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Where TALK comes from
In 2001, a transport and logistics company in the Yonne, in Burgundy, set out to simplify its operating tools. Its software was a set of bespoke developments hosted on a remote server, and every change went through an outside supplier.
Development started inside the company, for its own needs. Not to sell it: so that operations would run better.
Eight years later the system in place had been entirely replaced, module by module, without a single day of downtime — the UPSILON case tells that story.
Where TEDIES comes from
On 29 August 2011, TEDIES was spun out to publish TALK and offer it to others.
That is not a formality. Software written by people who ran operations does not resemble software written from a requirements document: the vocabulary is that of the loading dock, the screens follow the order in which the work is done, and the edge cases that cost you a morning were handled because someone was living them.
Where we are
In Monéteau, in the Yonne, at 45 avenue de Paris — Machérins industrial estate.
That is where the team, the development and the hotline are. When you call +33 3 86 53 98 34, you reach someone sitting next to the person who wrote the module you are talking about.
How the product moves forward
TALK does not move forward through a quarterly roadmap. It moves forward through real needs, voiced by people who run operations.
A customer asks us for something we cannot do? We develop it, and we do not invoice it as bespoke development. What was written for one goes into the catalogue and serves the others — that is what happened with Seyfert’s EDI.
It is also why the glossary on this site runs to 267 entries: the vocabulary of the trade is what we use every day.
Research
Two doctoral projects have been carried out within the company, in partnership with university laboratories, and published.
Route optimisation
Drivers-Inspired Ants for Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows — Dalicia Bouallouche, Jean-Baptiste Vioix, Éric Busvelle and Stéphane Millot. Presented at the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, Athens, December 2016.
The idea: to make two sources of information converge inside an ant colony algorithm — the short-term optimisation of the artificial ant, and the long-term experience accumulated by real drivers.
The work drew on data from a haulier in the Yonne, not on an academic test set. TALK’s optimisation engine came out of it.
Recognising delivery addresses
AddrRaG: Delivery Address Augmented Retrieval and Validation — El Moundir Faraoun, Nédra Mellouli and Stéphane Millot, December 2025, with the LIASD laboratory at Université Paris 8.
A delivery address keyed in by a customer is rarely clean: abbreviations, mistakes, missing details, a building with no number. This work covers the automatic retrieval and validation of the right address. TALK’s geocoding and recipient recognition come from it.
Apprentices
We take on apprentices and interns every year, in development as well as in operations. Several have stayed.
Joining us
No position is open right now. That is no reason not to write: we read everything, and we reply.