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Using mobile logistics to streamline
your business
Field service automation, which helps companies use mobile
devices to streamline
communications between offices and workers
in the field, is paying big dividends
By Matt Hines
July 24, 2007 - Field service automation is one of the most
advanced areas for mobile applications development among enterprises,
and at $280-million-per year laundry services provider Mac-Gray,
IT managers say such a project has helped the company clean
up both its operations and fuel growth.
Tracing its roots back to 1927, when the publicly-held company
became the nation's first certified distributor of Maytag brand
washing machines, Mac-Gray currently provides laundry outsourcing
services to an estimated 58,000 U.S. locations.
Customers of its services -- which include apartment buildings,
colleges, and other multi-tenant locations -- typically pay
the company to provide and service all of their coin-operated
laundry equipment under a lease relationship and then split
the revenues generated via use of the machines with Mac-Gray.
In 2003, as the company found itself looking to grow rapidly
via the acquisition of smaller rivals and simultaneously hoping
to better optimize its workforce of machine service technicians
and money collectors, Mac-Gray leaders decided to replace the
voice-based field force management system with a pair of data-driven
mobile applications that also embraced geo-location.
Four years later, having roughly tripled both the size of
its workforce and its annual revenues while dramatically increasing
productivity and lowering its consumption of fuel, company
executives are heralding the applications -- developed using
mobile platform software provided by Vettro -- as a resounding
key to its recent success.
"The impact of the applications we've built is fairly evident
as it's helped us to triple in size since we rolled them out,
and there's no question that they have also made us a more
competitive company in a lot of ways," said Mike Lento, vice
president of operations at Mac-Gray. "We wanted to become more
efficient in terms of saving time and money while bringing
onboard a lot of smaller companies, and adopting these mobile
applications allowed us to do that quickly."
Mac-Gray's workers had already been using their company-issued
cell phones to communicate with dispatchers, receive assignments,
and call in progress reports on their appointments for years.
Through the creation of its new applications -- dubbed internally
as TechLinx and CollectorLinx -- the company's service technicians
and money collectors, respectively, now send and receive text
messages about their status instead.
In addition to cutting the workers loose from their dispatchers
and saving the employees an average of one working hour per
day previously spent doing business on the phone, the application
is also used in geo-location tracking to maximize the routes
workers drive and the assignments they receive to save fuel
and mileage on the company's 500 vehicles.
Over the course of the project, the system has helped cut
fuel expenses and driven down the miles traveled each day by
an average of 15 percent per vehicle, Lento said.
The tools also channel other vital information back to Mac-Gray's
central business operations, including the average time it
takes for each transaction to occur and real-time inventory
updates of all the parts being used by the company's techs.
In that sense, the applications are helping the firm better
account for all of its assets and plan for the future, he said.
"We had a system that had workers spending a lot of time on
the phone in the morning and evenings trying to communicate
their progress back to the company, and it was very manual
and inefficient," said Lento. "Now our workers act more independently
and get more work done, and we use the environmental benefits
of the mobile system as a marketing tool."
Among the major benefits of using New York-based Vettro's
360 mobile software delivery platform, which helps companies
map and create workflow for their applications and tailor programs
to run on different types of devices, was that it allowed Mac-Gray's
own IT workers to retain complete control over their back-end
databases, which could be quickly integrated with the tools,
according to the executive.
The applications have also proven simple enough to work well
on low-cost devices and for most workers to pick them up without
extensive training, leading to further savings, said Lento.
Industry watchers have observed that while traditional providers
of enterprise applications have struggled to find the right
mix of technologies to push mobility into many types of large
businesses, customers like Mac-Gray who can embrace the tools
to streamline logistics have been among the first to benefit
from the systems.
"Companies in businesses such as overnight shipping and with
significant filed force populations have been among the first
to truly embrace enterprise mobility, and they will likely
continue to find ways to use it to promote real business improvements," said
Maribel Lopez, analyst with Forrester Research. "In a lot of
industries people still don't have the business case to defend
the investment in handhelds and related technologies, but those
companies who can apply these tools to logistics will continue
to be among the leading adopters."
