Around this time, Stephenson and his team began to search for a method to replace the voice-channel system. FedEx engaged Mobile Data International (now owned by Motorola), a small Vancouver-based company that provided a terminal that allowed couriers to receive dispatches via digital transmission. Initially, drivers would report package-delivery information to a central station every evening and upload the day’s data into the mainframe back at corporate headquarters in Memphis, Tenn. By the second generation of this technology, the devices wirelessly transmitted the data directly from the courier vans back to a central station.

Although Stephenson considered himself fortunate to have found Mobile Data International, the courier-management system was hardly turnkey. FedEx IT development staff worked for months and even years to develop the SuperTracker, a handheld bar code scanner system, that was fully rolled out in 1986. "We didn’t have a model to say how to build this. We just had a huge problem that we were forced to solve," he says.

FedEx senior management spent more than $100 million on wireless technology hardware and development work during a period of about three to four years. Securing the funding--not exactly chump change in the 1980s--was a straightforward affair because management viewed the project as strategic. "[Wireless] was part of our go-to-market strategy. It fit our concept of what we wanted our products to look like," says Stephenson. "It reduced the number of additional dispatchers we had to hire each year. It made it possible to grow that fast."

FedEx’s investment has paid for itself many times over. In fact, the courier-management system formed the basis for FedEx’s famed application in which customers can determine the whereabouts of their packages by their tracking numbers on the phone (and now on the Internet).

The 1 Percent Solution

For another wireless pioneer, however, the funding process wasn’t quite as painless. Frito-Lay began examining alternatives to manual collection of product sales information as far back as 1975, but the enabling technology for mobile computing did not yet exist. "Until the PC came out, the technology was just so cumbersome. You couldn’t even fit the [first mobile devices] into a route truck back then," recalls Feld, then Frito-Lay account manager for IBM. With the advent of the PC in the early 1980s, however, the time was ripe. One of the first things Feld did when he left IBM and joined Plano, Texas-based Frito-Lay as CIO in 1981 was to kick off a major R&D project.