InformationWeek

April 19, 1999

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Mobile Benefits

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For Clement Lee, a former software engineer who bought the company for $1 million in 1997, the transformation was a ground-up, $1.7-million project. Lee dispensed with a paper-based process that had its dispatcher manually shuffling some 100 drivers to serve 150,000 customers who order from among 210 restaurants. He did away with the drivers' Motorola two-way radios, which were limited. The dispatcher could talk to only one driver at a time, and the drivers often interrupted each other or spent as long as five minutes trying to get through.

Lee designed and implemented an Informix-based artificial-intelligence system to automate the process. The system is used in combination with Etak, the navigation system used in automobiles. These tools manage detailed logistical and human resources information, including data about the drivers' locations, their proximity to each restaurant, their average speed, each restaurant's food-preparation time, and even the weather, without human intervention. This lets one dispatcher handle as many as 4,000 orders for drivers, crucial for a company that wants to expand into more markets without adding significant labor costs.

On the drivers' end, Lee opted for AT&T PocketNet wireless cell phones equipped with data modems, cursor keys, and expanded screens that have three lines of text. Drivers use them to transmit data only--the news that they've picked up the order from a restaurant or delivered it to a particular location--to the artificial-intelligence system over the Cellular Digital Packet Data network. The phones run an application Dine-One-One developed using Handheld Device Markup Language, a network- and device-independent protocol from Unwired Planet Inc.

Clement Lee

The PocketNet service costs $14.95 a month per unit--a far more reasonable price than any alternatives, says Lee, who has purchased 100 PocketNet phones and has ordered another 100 for the Chicago and San Diego expansions. These were the only devices he found that offered reliable, national coverage at a reasonable price--a requirement for a company that needs to settle on a standard for its expanding operations.

With this system in place, Dine-One-One is prepared to establish a 50,000-square-foot national call center in Denver in September. The facility will have room for five to 10 dispatchers who will be able to serve drivers all over the country from one location.

The technology lets drivers make at least two additional deliveries during a five-hour shift, and it enables Dine-One-One to keep its promise to customers that they'll receive hot food within an hour 95.55% of the time. And in an industry where the average cost to process an order is $2.25, Dine-One-One spends $1 on phone orders, while orders from the Internet cost almost nothing. "We make restaurant delivery a science, not an art," says Lee.

Can portable computing devices help bring customers closer to a company? Streamline, a six-year-old, privately held delivery company that is growing at a rate of 10% a month, says so. Streamline delivers 10,000 grocery items and prepared meals, and picks up film, videos, dry cleaning, and UPS packages for customers in the Boston area and is preparing to expand into Washington this fall. Streamline prefers to think of itself as being in the relationship business. "Our customers order every week, so we have to make sure we deliver the perfect order or the relationship will break down," says David Blakelock, VP of operations.

To help the company complete client orders without error, Symbol Technologies' PDT 3100 handheld devices with bar-code scanners will soon be given to drivers of its fleet of 20 trucks. The devices, which run Symbol's operating system, will provide the final link in a supply chain the company closely monitors.

Streamline now uses an earlier version of the bar-code scanners to track each ordered item from the time it arrives at the company's warehouse until the moment it is loaded onto a truck bound for a customer's house. An employee scans the bar code on each item when it arrives at the warehouse (to make sure it matches Streamline's database detailing what was ordered) and when it's loaded into a bar-coded bin designated for a particular customer (to make sure the orders are complete). The employee also scans the bin itself as it's loaded onto a truck bound for a customer's home, with a few other scans in between, again to ensure accuracy.

With the new devices, essentially Palm computers with bar-code scanners and optional radio frequency communication, Streamline by September will be able to extend tracking from the time a truck leaves its dock until the goods arrive at their destination, a "Streamline box"--a combination refrigerator, freezer, and dry storage box with a keypad access system--situated in each customer's garage. Drivers will use the device to scan each bar-coded bin as it's taken off the truck and loaded into each Streamline box, to make sure they're delivering the right bins to the right customers all the time. The devices will upload information to the Microsoft SQL Server database in batch mode; if the driver misses a bin or scans an incorrect bin, he'll get a message on the device telling him so.

The devices will cost $1,000 each. Like most of the technology Streamline uses, they haven't gone through a formal cost-justification process. "When you're a growing company," Blakelock says, "you do a lot based on what you think is right."