Using mobile logistics to streamline your business

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.