Mar/April 2009

By rolling out a mobile workforce solution from Cognito, DX Group has made major gains in efficiency and responsiveness

If you have had a passport or bank card delivered recently, the chances are that it was delivered by the Secure Mail Services division of DX Group, the independent mail and courier specialist.

Through its SMS and Network Services divisions, the company handles around a million items per day for over 25,000 customers in both the B2C and B2B markets, operating from over 50 locations throughout the UK and Ireland. Over 90 per cent of deliveries are to residential addresses, and the majority of deliveries are made by contracted couriers.

With sensitive documents in its care, it's not surprising that DX places considerable emphasis on the security of its processes. And for the same reason, the company took great care when choosing a mobile workforce management solution. The good news is that it seems delighted with the solution it has found, and it reports a variety of benefits ranging from enhanced reliability to a reduction in journey times.

 

'Clients trust us to deliver valuable, confidential and sensitive mail and packages to their customers, which means that there can be no question over the performance of our network,' says Mike Stone, chief operating officer. 'We have to think two steps in advance of anyone who would seek to compromise our system.'

The company had been relying on comprehensive paper systems to provide security and an audit trail. 'It was a secure system, but once the business had grown to the point where it was handling 25 million packages a year, there was potential for processes to collapse,' Stone says. The customer centre, for example, was handling 20,000 calls a day, many of which were on the subject of re-delivery of items.

'With so many variables in our workflow process, not least the challenges of residential deliveries, a single point of failure can, and indeed will, lead to a breakdown in our processes. It's simply not acceptable to have any element of doubt in the system. Demonstrating this to our customers is critical for gaining their trust.'

For that reason the company took its time in choosing a mobile workforce solution, wanting to be sure that it found exactly the right package for its needs. But has now made its selection, and is rolling out a system from Cognito.

The managed service network operated by Cognito is providing the company with secure wireless data communications, and this has been matched to a specially-developed version of Cognito's Managed Workflow application called Directed Courier Workflow.

This replaces DX's former paper forms with an auditable, digital trail of communications between a courier's handheld device and the back office. Built-in alerts let couriers know if they are unlikely to meet agreed delivery times, and when this happens, recipients can be informed in advance of any changes to the service.

Previously, couriers were assigned deliveries and would then plan their own routes. Computerised vehicle routing software is now used to plan routes for them automatically. It takes into account the number of deliveries, their location, the time of day and any special considerations about the delivery area.

'Most of the couriers are owner-drivers,' Stone points out, 'so they are very happy to be doing more deliveries in fewer miles. From the customer viewpoint, we can extend delivery windows.'

Couriers have been equipped with Honeywell 7900 handheld devices with GPS location chips. These are used to check the location of the courier against the known coordinates of the delivery address in real time. So when a package is en route, the courier and customer can be warned about potential delays or address discrepancies, reducing the chance of delivery to the wrong place and at the wrong time.

When the courier does arrive, geo-referencing is combined with a camera on the handheld device and an on-screen prompt to give the same level of security as the old manual system. 'It was absolutely essential to nail this part of the process,' Stone says.

From the courier's viewpoint the system also saves time. In the words of Raymond Murphy, a DX Group courier: 'When we deliver the packages we must collect a three-point identifier of the location to ensure we have a fully visible trail of a delivery for our clients and their own customers.

'Previously all of this added a considerable amount of time to our working day, but with the new handhelds, the processes and proof of delivery are much more manageable.'

Meanwhile, back at the call centre there has been a 50 per cent drop in investigations into failed deliveries, simply because there is better visibility.

Steve Alderson, managing director at Cognito, sums up: 'By adopting a finely-tuned mobile workforce system, DX will ensure efficiencies can still be achieved, and most important, that customers remain confident in the service.'