Most new technologies are first deployed in large corporations and then make their way down the food chain to the small business. Very often it’s not the latest and greatest technology that gives an enterprise the competitive edge but it’s the way in which conventional technology is used to help serve its customers better.
Of course, large enterprises have teams of IT personnel who have a good understanding of the latest IT products and standards, and also of their company’s greater business strategy. They understand how any technology implementation must marry up with its employer’s commercial objectives.
In principle, technology must do likewise in a small business. In practice, most small firms can’t afford the luxury of hiring a full time IT manager.
With this problem in mind, Smart Company thought it would be a good idea to examine how best practice models from enterprise-level IT could be applied to a small business.
To achieve this, Smart Company invited a corporate IT manager to sit down over lunch with an enthusiastic, self-starting small business manager, to compare notes about their experiences.
Derek Monahan is national information manager with DHL in Ireland is currently on secondment to create a centralised e-mail system for over 150,000 DHL employees worldwide. He was joined by Vincent Dodd, managing director of small Dublin courier company INDN Express.
In a company that has gone “from zero to medium-sized” in the space of seven years, Dodd takes responsibility for handling IT issues and jokingly describes himself as the “MD, IT manager and tea maker rolled into one”. Obviously, the company can’t afford to hire a full-time techie so it relies on Dodd to contract a reliable services company to support its computers. Unfortunately, up to this point, Dodd’s experiences with third party service providers have been less than positive.
Hopefully, DHL’s much travelled and well-versed national information manager will be able to provide him with some new ideas to help remedy the situation and help him make more of his business technology.
The date: Midday lunch appointment, Friday, April 26th. The venue: Eden restaurant, Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, Dublin.
When you’re talking IT, a courier business is a good small business to start with. Success in that sector relies heavily on the effective use of technology. At a very basic level, the telephone is the customer’s first line of contact when they’re looking to get a parcel delivered or collected.
And when a base controller needs to contact a courier they usually rely on a radio system to do it. This is still the case for INDN.
Not surprisingly, a large shipping company such as DHL has moved on from this. Derek Monahan explains that with such a large fleet of vans, motorbikes, airplanes and even barges in Holland, the company needs to have a real time method of both communicating and confirming pick ups and deliveries.
The Wonder of Wireless
Using wireless GSM cellular technology, its drivers use non-contact scanners with built-in GSM sim cards to send information about parcels back to their bases. Monahan explains “The minute a customer makes a booking with us, the booking is converted on our database system to an SMS message to be sent immediately to the courier van. Once sent, it is sucked into a microwand handheld in the van. This device displays the pick up information and address to the driver.”
Monahan goes on to say that once the parcel is collected, this information is sent wirelessly to DHL control so the recipient can be pre-advised by text message and any necessary customs clearance can be secured.
Vincent Dodd’s reaction: Star Trek technology! He believed the cost of implementing such a solution would make it a non-starter for such a small company as INDN. In saying this, he was turned on by the fact that this wireless tracking system was helping DHL to offer higher levels of customer service. “We (INDN) are in the service industry and in it people make mistakes, so we have to minimise them. Technology should be able to help us with this, and in some cases, spot a potential mistake before it happens.”
Dodd also believes that in his company where “you have a window of two to three hours to pick up and make a delivery,” high quality customer service drives the business.
He would like to use technology like wireless GSM to take the pressure off his customer service staff, but he would also like to do it at a keen price. He imagines an efficient system where if a customer calls his queries department to find out information about a delivery, the exact location of the parcel’s whereabouts could be determined immediately and reported to them.
At this point, Monahan added that it would be possible for Dodd to find a cost-effective wireless solution. He mentioned a company called WASP Technology-a small Irish software house which had demonstrated an interesting wireless product to the IT department in DHL. The application used Palm V handhelds with sim cards and built-in infra red scanners so information about picks up and deliveries could be transmitted back to a central database in real time. For less money, the handhelds could be configured just to include the scanner so information about deliveries can still be stored on the database but not uploaded to it until the courier gets back to the office.
WASP won’t sting…
Monahan came across this solution from WASP when he was looking for a tool to enable DHL’s sub-contractors in Ireland fall in line with a global directive. This directive stated that within a specific period of time before a delivery, the contracted courier was required to check back with the customer to give them an update on their parcel’s status. Monahan says that “adhering to this directive was difficult in peripheral regions like rural Ireland, where often there was no communication between DHL and the sub-contractor until the following day. We wanted to give our smaller partners a handheld system to allow them to interact with our system to allow real-time checking.”
While Monahan was talking about what WASP could offer, Dodd intervened and mentioned that he had looked at some wireless tracking products before. But the quotes he got back were hugely expensive: €2,000 to €3,000 per user and well beyond the scope of his company’s budget.
SMS to customers
Racking his brains, Monahan then recalled that a former channel manager with Irish Express, Josephine Eviston, had got involved with a new company. This new venture, Swiftxt (www.swiftxt.com) offers an SMS product that allows a courier to notify a customer by text message when to expect a delivery. This, he thought would be a very useful tool for a company like INDN where much of its business involves delivering parcels to home addresses. The company could send a text message to the recipient requesting that they be home at a certain time to sign for the parcel. If the time suggested wasn’t suitable, in turn, the recipient could send a message back with a time when they would be there. This would save the courier having to send a van out on a wasted journey. Monahan promised that he would pass on the relevant details to Dodd when he got back to his office.
Basic IT
The two then started to talk a little about INDN’s existing IT infrastructure. Dodd confessed that his company was in need of a serious IT upgrade. Its two servers currently run DOS programs and the office PC network isn’t connected to the customer and orders database. Monahan pointed out that an upgrade to a Windows platform was necessary before any kind of wireless setup could be put in place. He advised him to look at getting a Microsoft SQL platform installed.
He also advised him to request that his software provider also equip him with hardware. In this way, if anything goes wrong with the system, INDN would be able to request support from one company and avoid relying on multiple vendors for support for different types of technology. This avoids the nightmare scenario where if something goes wrong one provider blames it on the other and vice versa.
Java’s where it’s at
Monahan also suggested that INDN should look to exploit the potential of Java development in its business. With some Java scripting, Monahan said that it would be possible for INDN to link up its customer database with a Web page so customers could request couriers and do online queries. Obviously implementing Java is an expensive business if the company was to look to hire full-time programmers.
As a less expensive workaround, INDN should look at hiring some computer science students part time to do the Java scripting for it. These students, Monahan says, should work to certain standards, to ensure that after they leave, other programmers could come in and take up where they left off. INDN should look to the likes of Compaq and Microsoft for information on the standards that should be adhered to.
Shared services
As one final way to keep IT costs to a minimum, Monahan suggested that as INDN passes on business to multi-national shipping companies, it should look to form a technology partnership with one of them. By doing so, it could piggyback off their investment in IT.
“Put pressure on those companies and say if you want us as a strategic partner locally then what are you willing to offer us in the form of IT support.” Monahan urges. “This is the concept of shared services and as long as you (INDN) were willing to pay something towards it, the larger carrier should be happy to share some of its extra IT capacity.”
About DHL
- Private company owned by Deutche Post, World Net, Lufthansa and Japan Airlines with the balance of shares held by two private trusts
- 500 employed in seven service centres in Ireland
- A fleet of 251 aircraft and 17,000 ground vehicles worldwide
- 6,000 offices in 228 countries
- 168 million shipments worldwide per annum
About INDN Express
- Private company owned by Vincent Dodd and Gerry Whelan
- 16 full time employees and 44 on contract
- A fleet of 30 vans, 25 motorcycles and five pushbikes
- One office in Store Street, Dublin
- 200,000 shipments Dublin-wide per annum
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