The official rollout began in 1986, and soon the sales reps were sucking up the HHCs as fast as they could get them. When the application began to take hold and business continued as usual, the atmosphere among sales reps became euphoric. "It was a pretty exciting time," recalls Feld.

The HHC application had immediate fringe benefits. For the first time, for example, Frito-Lay was able to change prices on products quickly and to have different prices for different geographic regions. Previously, with the paper forms, drivers had to fill out forms that were preprinted with price information. It would have been too cumbersome to change the prices on the forms often. The HHC system gave a lot more flexibility. Most of the reps were undoubtedly happy to get back their evening private time.

"The system paid for itself from day one," says Feld, because the sales force had agreed to give up 1 percent of their sales budgets to fund it. "But really, we justified it on the basis of operating necessity also. We couldn’t continue to grow at the rate that we had been without putting some kind of system in place."

Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Upgrading the application meant changing the hardware as well as the application itself in certain situations. For every major change (about once a year or so), Feld and his team had to go through the painstaking process of getting all the devices back from the thousands of field service reps and then deploying a whole new round of devices. It was tedious, time-consuming and expensive. "If we decided to put a new application scheme on the handheld, our cycle time was about a year to get the new application burned into the programmable memory," Feld remembers, grateful the days of hardware-centricity are past. (And now the Internet has smoothed the task of software distribution beyond anything he could ever have imagined.)

The Consortium From Hell

UPS also had to go to extraordinary lengths in its wireless efforts. With the rollout of its DIAD I in 1990--a project that cost $350 million for research, development and deployment--Atlanta-based UPS needed to find wireless communication capability so that the drivers could transmit information continuously on collection rather than going back to a central location at the end of the day to manually upload the data. The options at the time were to buy radio transmission services (but this was mostly in metropolitan service areas, or only 40 percent of UPS’s delivery area), use the nascent public cellular carriers or build their own radio towers and construct their own network. UPS chose the second option.