The company employs around 4,000 people in the UK (including franchise staff) and has around 2,500 employees involved in making deliveries across the UK, Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. On top of this, it has over a hundred field sales workers, visiting businesses and individuals to secure new business.
It selected a range of mobile communications devices and services from T-Mobile, including 3G data cards, MDA IIIs, voice connections and GPS navigation. In total, Business Post has more than 1,000 individual connections to the T-Mobile network, allowing its workers to function quickly and efficiently while on the move.
The T-Mobile web’n’walk card provides laptop users with access to T-Mobile’s 3G and GPRS platforms, as well as the ability to connect to the UK’s largest network of more than 1,000 wi-fi hot spots.
The T-Mobile MDAIII is a high-performance PDA device, to which Business Post added a Voyager satellite navigation application, allowing for GPS tracking.
Business Post equipped its field sales team with the T-Mobile web’n’walk card, enabling them to connect securely to office systems, applications, the internet and email on their laptops while on the move. The field sales team no longer needs to schedule returns to the office to log their work and update the systems. Instead, they can now perform these tasks remotely, and means that they visit more potential customers each day, significantly improving their performance and productivity.
Chris Russell-Miller, IT infrastructure manager, says: “Not only does it mean that they can visit more customers every day, but it also improves the sales pitches that they can give to each customer. For example, our sales team are now able to demonstrate all of our web-based offerings online thanks to the fast and reliable internet connection that the data card provides.”
Each of the 500 “same-day delivery” drivers have been equipped with the MDA III and added the Voyager GPS tracking application from DA Systems.
The MDA III enables drivers to update company systems while on the job and means that the local office can track the location of each vehicle at all times. This makes it a lot easier to allocate jobs to the nearest available vehicle to any particular pick up location, ensuring that drivers can get through more deliveries during their shifts.
“Real-time tracking means that we are able to deploy vehicles in the most time and fuel efficient way, which provides us with cost savings and efficiency gains. This in turn means that our customers receive a faster, smoother overall service. Added to this, Business Post is also piloting a new service which will extend the real-time tracking provided by the MDA III to its customers, which will enable them to track parcels throughout their journey until delivery.
Business Post is trialling the new Blackberry 8700g as an alternative device for its fleet of drivers.
