Unplugging

By the early 1980s, companies such as FedEx, United Parcel Service of America (UPS) and Frito-Lay had experienced such wrenching growth that they could not continue without the aid of some cutting-edge technology. The paper-and-pen technology that had run these companies’ field service operations up to that time had reached the end of its natural life.

Exigent circumstances have a way of greasing the wheels when it comes to money for research. Or, as Doug Fields, vice president for UPS, puts it: "When them that’s got the bucks has the ideas, it’s a lot easier to get funding." Fields, a 12-year UPS veteran, oversaw the early 1990s rollout of his company’s self-developed handheld delivery information acquisition device (DIAD), which couriers used (and still do use) to track information about package deliveries.

How times have changed.

For those going wireless today, basic principles gleaned from early experience still apply. As Feld can tell you, it’s most important to pilot your wireless application on a tiny group, as he did with his selected early adopters at Frito-Lay. You must have a time frame to begin the formal rollout, of course, but be flexible. Wait for perfection before going to the next step, he advises. Deploying a flawed wireless application can do incalculable damage to user acceptance.

And don’t forget that in the scheme of things, wireless is still new technology. As such, Winn Stephenson, a senior vice president of IT for FedEx, advises that you devote an in-house team to it. "Even with all the advances in public networks, wireless has enough subtleties and nuisances to be managed as a separate component. Any significant deployment requires quite a bit of work to understand coverage issues, performance, latency and other issues. You need someone in-house to sort through all this for you," says Stephenson.

"Who’s This Package For?"

A decade after its 1971 founding, FedEx was growing by rates between 35 percent and 50 percent per year. That was good news for the company, of course, but bad news for the roughly 8,000 couriers and dispatchers delivering packages to homes and businesses nationwide. The dispatchers were using a Motorola two-way radio system--broadcast over proprietary FedEx voice channels--to contact the drivers (also called couriers) to let them know where to go next. But each channel could adequately support only about 100 drivers. The company was quickly running out of bandwidth. As the number of drivers using the same channel went up, it became more difficult to access an open channel because of system overload, and drivers struggled to hear which message zinging over the system was meant for them.