Mobile Delivery

I recently received a direct mail marketing piece from a HighJump Software competitor. The mailer included a press release announcing that this company had “enhanced direct store delivery integration” and a one page datasheet which described a direct store delivery value chain as manufacturing + regional warehouse + mobile resources + retail shelf.

HighJump Software is the North American market leader for direct store delivery software solutions. If our primary competitor in the warehouse management systems market had encroached on our market position I needed to know. Perhaps they had acquired a route accounting solutions provider or acquired a provider of mobility solutions for mobile selling and delivery at the retail location. I consulted a trusted industry analyst who confirmed my suspicions… this was marketing hype and this company’s approach to direct store delivery still had significant “holes.”

Anyone familiar with the value chain of direct store delivery companies knows there are some specific complexities that must be addressed in order to have “comprehensive coverage across the extended supply chain.” Here are some things companies should consider when search for direct store delivery software solutions:

Certified Route Accounting Systems

Route Account Systems are unique software systems to manage the complexities of route-based sales and delivery. They typically manage the entire order-to-cash cycle and are geared toward the world where sales, inventory, and business metrics are all tied to a “route.” Although traditional ERP systems can be used for route accounting systems, they typically require customization to deal with complex pricing/promotion, cash settlement, truck inventory, and supplier e-commerce integration. To further understand the complexities in the beverage value chain read It is Hard for Anheuser-Busch to be Procter and Gamble.

Mobile Sales and Delivery Applications

Success or failure in a direct store delivery business is determined at the store shelf. Direct store delivery companies have large workforces of mobile sales and delivery professionals who need to be equipped with mobility technology for them to effectively accomplish their objectives. HighJump Software provides a comprehensive suite of mobility products which support industry best practices for order capture, goal-based selling, delivery tracking and cash settlement. For more details on these solutions read about our latest mobility suite product release HighJump Software Enhances Mobility Solutions With New Release of Mobile Route Sales and Delivery Software Suite.

Load Optimization

Optimized loading of side bay beverage trucks can be complex. While there are numerous packages for creating optimized load plans of traditional van trailers or flatbed trailers, optimizing for side bay beverage trucks is another animal. Additionally, this business problem becomes even more complex when you have a “peddle” environment (driver selling off truck without pre-sold orders) and driver preferences must be taken into account at the load and pallet level.

I think the moral of the story is “don’t believe the hype.” Direct store delivery software solutions are specialized for the unique needs of this industry. Direct store delivery software solutions deal with complexities of supplier integration, cash settlement and truck inventory. A WMS, TMS and retail workforce solution will not meet the needs of most food and beverage distributors in their direct store delivery operations.

Being in the handheld based solution business for quite awhile now, there is this voice in my head that keeps saying that there is more to the whole Smartphone thing than simply changing the device we capture our mobile sales, service and delivery transactions on. The fight for the mobile desk top is still raging on and there is no clear winner in sight. Open architectures that can span the operating systems will have a definite advantage. In the ruggedized space, at least for the near term, Microsoft rules the way. However, that cannot be said for what is being carried in the pockets of executives, sales people and even the man on the street.

Route Accounting and DSD systems are fantastic at collecting data. They collect information about sales, location, inventory, trends, specials, lost sales, movements and the list goes on. Then this little light goes on; what about creating a data push model to the outside world? The new killer app may not be in changing the way we collect the data but what we do with it. Some of this requires software, other parts of it are just implementation.

•  IMAGINE: The CEO receives up to the minute sales vs. expected data on his iPhone with drill down data against individual line items or categories that are not meeting the plan.

• IMAGINE: Pre-sending the predicted “Suggested” or “Perfect” order calculated by the Route Accounting System to the customer’s BlackBerry and having them pre-approve or edit the orders and add special instructions.

• IMAGINE: After a driver makes a delivery stop, alerting the merchandiser and the customer AP team that the order is on-sight and is ready for the next step.

• IMAGINE: Your customer can push orders and requirements based on current stock levels from his Android phone to update stock levels and recalculate suggested order levels.

The answer here is that we can completely change the customer interaction paradigm from a push only environment to an interactive environment. The “web” based customer portal is the past already. The new battleground is in the pocket of the businessman. Two years ago, I did about 20% of my email on my phone and I would never surf the web. Today I use my phone and my desktop interchangeably. Our market is changing, the users are much more technically able. This is the most exciting time ever to be involved with handheld technology. There is a revolution underway. It will be a game of leading or dying as the way customers interact with suppliers evolves to a new reality in all facets of business.

HighJump Software announces the latest release of its market leading mobility solution for mobile sales and mobile delivery. HighJump Mobile Sales Advantage, HighJump Virtual Cooler, and HighJump RouteXpress have been enhanced based on evolving technology and industry needs.

The HighJump mobile suite for direct store delivery (DSD) extends the route accounting system into the field for real-time visibility of sales and customer data. HighJump’s mobile products help integrate selling, marketing and delivery efforts across the organization. The HighJump mobile delivery system combines order processing, delivery, peddle sales, invoice management and comprehensive settlement capabilities to streamline daily delivery activities.

Read the full press release.

In the technology world we hear a lot about “best practices.”  This is usually a carefully couched catch phrase that means “we did it our way and you should do it that way.”  This is one of those over abused phrases that needs to be added to everyone’s Board Room Bingo game and never used again.  With that said, there are truly best of breed methods that lead the industry.  However, the application of these methods needs to be highly personalized.  There is more than one way to do things and the term “best” depends on many factors that influence that particular situation.

In software, if there was a best then we wouldn’t need multiple vendors and we certainly wouldn’t need consultants to understand the business and implement solutions that maximize the business benefits to the company.  Solutions need to be highly configurable to adapt to the “best fit” for each and every customer. There are many ways to do that. You can take the workflow modeling process or you can take a flag driven process.  Direct Store Delivery environments are highly dynamic and business processes may need to change on a dime.  Unfortunately, many DSD organizations don’t really have the luxury of IT departments to run their route accounting systems and mobile delivery software. The tools built into the system need to be deployed so that normal business people can change, test and deploy them without the luxury of techie folks.

We hear people talk about “best practices” as a way to combat “highly configurable” as an implementation approach. It sounds so good and it looks great on a PowerPoint slide. After all, it’s the “best.”  Believe me that anyone who is in the business can configure the industry standard methods.  They simply wouldn’t survive in the business if they couldn’t.  Let’s start with that as a given.  The real trick is finding partners and software providers who can reflect your business in the software and help you grow.  Making it a practice is best, not a best practice.

There is an interesting term I have heard over the years about people who do the actual direct store delivery job. It goes something like, “If you are smart enough to do the job you may be too smart to take it.” The implication is that to do a really good job you need to have a kind of personal discipline and commitment to success as well as skill with people and sales that are not often found in industries where there is such a physical component. I have had the pleasure of working with and meeting many superstars in this industry; they are truly one of a kind individuals and are very talented. There is a true disconnect between the incentives put in place for many of these talents and a kind of regimented distrust that is prevalent in the DSD industry.

This brings us to the topic du jour. Much of the incentive in the industry is sometimes based around a relative distrust of the workforce. This can be demotivating in many cases. One of the most interesting strategies I have seen is by taking the normal performance metrics and including the route people in a kind of daily planning. The route supervisor meets each route man at the end of every day with a pile of reports: sales, returns, missed stops, time reports etc. and having a daily meeting. You change this meeting from being a performance meeting to being a planning meeting to go over what went right and what went wrong. Out of that, you develop strategies to improve tomorrow. Then you pay the route people on performance improvements.

Posting any great ideas or trends on a weekly board creates a kind of buzz around improving the sales. The people on the road are often quite bright and often underutilized. This experience can be used for the good of the company as long as you just ask. Of course there are exceptions. By and large, the biggest improvements in your very particular world are sitting at your fingertips for the asking. Often the man on the street simply feels no one would listen if they suggested something. What great opportunities lie out there. Our mobile delivery customers that have done this are getting spectacular results. Just a thought: turn the punitive controls into positive affirmation and change the culture.

Almost every company spends time and energy on customer focused marketing campaigns and strategies. We go to trade shows, buy advertising and put up great websites. Strangely, we spend almost no time or effort on marketing to our own people so that they carry that message forward to the customer as an enthusiastic advocate for the company. The people who deal with the customers are the best carriers of the corporate banner; a few bad apples spoil the entire basket.

As we deploy mobile sales, service and delivery systems for our direct store delivery and route accounting systems customers, it occurred to me that we are putting a device in the hand of everyone who directly serves our customers. We actively tell people about the great multi-media features that are available in these mobile delivery devices. You can show slides or commercials and look at spreadsheets. Why isn’t this device being used to market the value of the company to carrier rather than just the end customer? We track quotas and targets, maybe we could use it to improve and mold the impression our people have of the companies they work for.

Nothing sells better than enthusiasm and a belief in what they do. My thinking here is that with so much of our lives being interacted with through web-based and hand-held based technology, we could take a page out the internet book and ensure our own people are surrounded by the messaging they should be bringing to the customers. Everyone is on Twitter and Facebook; we are all used to seeing banner ads and messages all day long. What if we used that type of idea to reinforce the ideas we want carried forward about our own company or products. Many of these adds are contextual; think about how that might work when you sales person is dealing with a specific customer face to face.

This might be one of those cases where we are so used to working on one end of a problem that we didn’t know the other end existed. Just a random thought ...

Some of you might ask: what is InterBev 2010? InterBev is the largest North American conference for non-alcoholic beverages put on by the American Beverage Association (ABA). Due to HighJump Software’s leadership position in the direct store delivery software market, I recently took part in the InterBev Advisory Committee. This committee is comprised of the industry leaders throughout all facets of the beverage industry.

After attending I came away very energized by the prospects for an excellent conference. It is clear that the ABA is committed to creating an innovative event with a lot of thoughtful consideration to making the event valuable for attendees. We have all probably been to more conferences and tradeshows than we would care to remember but they are looking to change the traditional recipe. While I don’t want to give away the secret sauce, I think you will see a lot more interactive sessions and targeted ways for you to network with specific companies in your sphere of the beverage ecosystem. Just like many companies supply chains that decide to leverage technology to take their operations to the next level, the ABA has some exciting projects underway to deploy technology that will allow the attendees to maximize the value of an onsite event.

Save the date. The conference is September 22-24, 2010 in Orlando Florida. See you there!

Good things come from speaking with users. Last week we had our annual user convention in Florida. This is fantastic gathering of HighJump customers from around the world and across our many solution sets. I am always humbled by the ways customers use the system in innovative ways. Very often we get to see these little nuggets of brilliance that are being used in the field.

Normally I shy away from talking about our products. However, in order to tell the story, I need to give you a couple of tidbits.  In one of our flagship direct store delivery software (DSD), route accounting systems (RAS), called HighJump Route Administrator™, we have a feature called suggested order.  It allows you to create a calculation script that suggests which products to put on the shelf and the proper quantities. One of the possible data points that can be captured and used is the current customer quantity on hand.  If you capture that on every visit you can calculate your sell through rates and inventory turnover. We had always spoken about this as a way to ensure you avoided two situations: Product expiring on the shelf (waste) and running out of product (lost sales).

One of our customers explained to us the fortunate unexpected consequence of doing this.  When you set up a new store with your products you make a lot of guesses about the profile of that store and the products that they will sell. You tend to use a lot anecdotal experience and demographic data. However, in the end it is a bit of a best guess. Outside factors that are very hard to account for tend to affect the sales at any individual selling point. The unexpected consequence of measuring the Customer Quantity on Hand at each visit and adjusting the Suggested Build-to levels is that the product mix ends up self adjusting to account for the actual sales profile of that store.  In fact, it does this very quickly. Even if you get it completely wrong at the beginning, it will adjust itself within a few weeks. Using a little bit of smarts, you can also then make some assumptions about new products to put in that location and just as easily test the viability of those new products in that location. If you are really clever, you can also measure the impact on the rest of the product mix by adding or subtracting different lines. Carefully adding and subtracting lines on 6 week interval to drive product excitement has a drastic impact on bottom line profitability.

Your DSD data tells you everything you need to know about shelf level execution and the product mix effect of different product availability.  This leads you into food cost planning and profitability. Who knew …

HighJump customers packed into the Introduction to HighJump RouteCenter session Tuesday morning to hear more about HighJump's newest next generation route accounting system. The session turned quickly to an interactive discussion between the group and the presenters, Chris Senden, Senior Account Manager, and Bill Antoszewski, Technical Product Manager. Customers fired off question after question about features and functionality they'd like to implement into their own organizations.

HighJump RouteCenter is HighJump’s newest route accounting system with complete functionality for beer distributors, soft drink bottlers, and wine and spirits distributors. Key functionality in the system includes order management, inventory management, route settlement, pricing, promotions and integration to HighJump Software’s mobile software suite. HighJump Software recently announced the release of HighJump RouteCenter On-Demand, a Software as a Service (SaaS) version of the system.

Senden said that customers love the feature-rich HighJump RouteCenter because of its ease of integration and robust flexibility.

One customer summed it up on his way out of the session with, "Wow."

There is this ago old idea that if your route sales team could serve customers faster, they would be able to serve more customers in the course of the day.  If you could do that, you might be able to operate fewer routes. In a vacuum, that is great logic and makes a ton of sense.  However, there are two things that get in the way and need to be a part of the capacity planning process for your Direct Store Delivery (DSD) environment.

1.       Is there any incentive or way to ensure that your sales team sees more customers rather than just going home earlier?

2.       Is there a point at which serving a customer faster reduces the volume of sales done at that customer?

For the first case, it is important to properly compensate and/or motivate serving more customers.  The first thing we need to do is ensure that we remove physical barriers to serving customers.  This is largely done with technology to make sure all of the calculation and grunt work is taken out of the process. (Enter HighJump Software's direct store delivery software for a shameless plug).  A couple of principles come into play. You want to make sure that the sales team perceives an increase in their earning potential when weighed against the workload of adding an additional customer.  There needs to be a definite effort vs. return benefit to them. We also need to balance the point at which we out-serve the capacity of a geographic market.  This leads into the second point.

Just about everyone has gone to McDonald’s where everything is designed to serve you quickly rather than developing a strong relationship with your server. The entire principle of the Direct Sales environment is about being a part of the customers business and developing a relationship and building the business together. My last blog post dealt with this in more detail. However, safe to say that it is important that we build business development time and activities into the sales cycle and enabling technologies to help them build the business and increase profitability rather than just be fast.  An important use of capacity is to build on the sales with your existing customers by placing new products and lines and improving the merchandising and placement of existing lines to drive better business.

If you find yourself with capacity planning issues, it is critical to take some of these factors into consideration or you may be leaving capacity unused on the table.  That is just like throwing away cash.  No one likes to do that.

In route sales, direct store delivery (DSD) or any type of sales where you have to go see the customer, more customers isn’t always better.  When they walk in your door, the more the better. When you have to drive to see them, there becomes a point when you shouldn’t drive any further. In this case, the 80/20 rule is alive and healthy (The Pareto Principal). Eighty percent of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Does it make sense to look at the customer base and optimize your mobile sales operations to maximize the revenue/profit potential rather than just making sure they drive the best route?  Traditional “route optimization” may fall somewhat short if you look at it only from a miles driven perspective.

Some of the more innovative players are starting to look at metrics such as “cases per mile” or “dollars per mile.”  These are great route performance metrics, but they end up being somewhat attached to the specific route that customer is on that day. What about the customer performance metric?  If we go back to Pareto, we can make a couple of interesting observations.  If 80% of my sales come from 20% of my customers, then possibly 80% of our loss comes from 20% of the customers. So let’s look at only two groups.  The top 20% of the customers and the bottom 20% of the customers. Let’s not change a thing for that middle 60%; we will assume that we serve them correctly and they are basically happy.

What if we were to take that top 20% that provide the bulk of the revenue and change our model so that they are served better?  Maybe they will be served more often or by more people.  The idea here is over-serve our best customers and partner with them to improve our already thriving and profitable business with them.  This might include having an account manager/sales person, a merchandiser and delivery function where it makes sense. We may serve them 7 days a week where other customer may be served 3 or 5 days a week. The idea here is to get better at what we are already good at and build on our strengths.

Maybe we should be looking at serving the bottom 20% less than we do already.  It is possible that we can make the same or more money by reducing their service levels down to one or two days a week if we have to drive too far to serve them or they do not buy a minimum level of product? Perhaps service charges are required for customers who do not buy in quantity. Some customer may not be worth having (perish the thought). In our society we sometimes try to “improve on our weaknesses.”  We get better at things that we will never be great at and in so doing also make ourselves more attractive to customers that are not in our primary target audience.

So back to the premise, by over-serving customers that we want to attract we then get even better at what we are already good at.  We make ourselves less attractive to customers that do not fit the business as well and we end up improving profitability.  We can then extend this customer analysis to geographic revenue clusters to figure out of there are areas we should be over-serving above and beyond the individual client. Having fewer but better customers may be a possible reality.

ESP is all you need to get it right every time.  Now back on planet earth we need a slightly better approach. Most of our mobile sales (DSD) customers are after that magic pill that tells them exactly what to have on the truck and what everyone will sell.  The problem is that no one can really tell you how to calculate it. The good news is that it is easier to predict what your total volume of customers will buy vs. an individual customer. The law of averages works in your favor. In our adventures in selling direct store delivery solutions, everyone says they want to pre-populate their orders for their drivers and salespeople.  Sometimes we are talking about just putting in a shopping list of products that this customer normally buys and then adding the quantities later. Some people want to be a lot more scientific. Often the question of how to calculate the perfect order is met with a stunned silence.  What about the scientific approach?

Using some rudimentary calculations it is pretty easy to figure out the average amount of each product that is sold to a customer in an average week or day. We can also calculate the average variance from that average.  This gives you something called standard deviation.  In the normal course of business, the vast majority (usually 99%) will come within three standard deviations from that average. If you trying to do this for an individual customer you would be looking the behavior of that one guy; that is very hard to predict.  If you look at the number for all the customers on your route and break that into days of the week or even weeks of the month, then you have a pretty reliable number.  Using this number on a given day and adding three deviations worth of product should ensure that you never run out.  Because we don’t start from empty in most cases, it also ensures that we turn inventory over on the trucks. The perfect truck load gives you the ability minimize weight and ensure you serve the customer every time.  

Now take that same calculation and expand it for the entire company. This gives you a bigger population of data and therefore a more accurate number.  This number can be used to optimizer order quantities and drive manufacturing. All of this from a simple attempt to give your driver a list of products that are likely to be sold to save a little bit of typing.  I knew stats class would come in handy someday.

Every conversation I have had with a new customer around automation always seems to include some discussion of reducing paper. Many customers have been extremely successful in reducing the paper that is generated internally. Some technologies that are specifically using direct store delivery software include DEX and/or EDI to limit or eliminate customer-side paper. This works very well for large customers. With that said, it is amazing how often these electronic transactions are supported by a printed form. It’s a bit crazy if you really think about why these systems were developed in the first place.  Most convenience stores, gas stations and restaurants are still operated by local owner operators and these technologies are not readily accessible to them. They are stuck with, wait for it … more paper.

Let’s take a new millennium look at what customer-facing paperless could mean in the route accounting systems world. Most people today are getting used to receiving their bank statements and various types of bills in electronic format. When I rent a car, I almost instantly receive an email with a PDF electronic version of my final invoice. Strangely, the demand for this in mobile delivery, sales, and service has not been strong, but I believe it is coming.  In the wireless environment, we can capture orders, convert them to invoices, take and apply payments and then capture a signature.  This is all transmitted back to the host in real time.  Imagine the owner of the store or the accountant receiving that invoice electronically just as fast.  There is no chance that the sixteen year old working the counter at the time loses that document, and it provides an electronic delivery trail.

Sometimes we over-think these things.  Simple solutions often yield the biggest impact. A toaster isn’t complex but it is a lot easier than lighting a fire to make the bread crunchy.

Photo via Flicr user luxomedia.

As I begin blogging, I hope my thoughts are useful to some you out there.  The power of the internet is the transactions and interactions that it creates.  This is where collaborative magic happens and I look forward to the conversations and feedback that are created.

In working with literally hundreds of customers over the last 20 years in the IT business, I see a similar problem all of the time.  People invest a great deal of time and money to implement new state of the art technology so that they can be leading edge and then spend an equally staggering amount on making it do what they do today.  The argument is often cloaked in well founded arguments around how the processes they have are working and don’t need to be changed.  The horse and buggy, quill pen and typewriters all worked as well.  This approach is particularly evident when organizations are changing their direct store delivery software and route accounting systems.

When we dig into it, we find that a lot of the processes we see in the field are created due to physical limitations that were caused by data only being communicated when field representatives returned to the office or the physical passing of paper.  With wireless communications and real-time information those limitations are gone.  This creates the opportunity to rethink some of those basic assumptions. If we receive orders in real time, do we really need to wait until tonight or tomorrow to pick them?  If the inventory is already on a truck that is nearby, can’t we just dispatch that truck and call it done? It is really about using our workflow management solutions to change the way we work.  Fax machines were state of the art less than 20 years ago.  Wireless technology is changing the way customers want us to serve them.  The real question is, will we keep up and create the opportunities that grew our traditional businesses in the first place?

Image via Flickr user Beaverton Historical Society.
 

• Improve throughput
• Reduce new employee training time
• Improve safety with hands-free and eyes-free picking
• Leverage configurable, voice-enabled picking options

Voice for Direct Store Delivery Software
You can use voice recognition software in conjunction with HighJump Load Management to manage picking of pallets. Here’s how it works:

• HighJump Load Management optimizes the load for the vehicle and creates the pick instructions. It passes the pick instructions to the handheld device which converts it to voice commands.
• The picker interacts with the software to record any changes to the picks.
• The completed transactions flow back to HighJump Load Management for completion.

HighJump Software just had another customer go live with HighJump Warehouse Advantage and the Embedded Voice module. This customer is a third party logistics provider who plans to use the improved productivity and accuracy of their voice-enabled WMS Warehouse Management System to help them gain additional clients. Yesterday we released a video success story on Fox Racing who also utilizes embedded voice technology in their operations. See the Fox Racing video. The benefits of voice technology in the warehouse seem well understood by most distribution professionals I speak with. Most are quick to point out improved productivity (takes less time to accomplish tasks), safety (workers are hands and eyes free), and accuracy (complex check digit validations). Yet I often hear several misconceptions about voice technology that prevent adoption. Below is a listing of five common misconceptions I frequently hear about voice technology.

1.       I require proprietary hardware solutions for voice.

At one time this was true. However, voice technology providers like HighJump Software’s partner Vocollect, have worked with the leading rugged mobile computer manufactures to provide a solution that runs on a traditional device used in the warehouse. It is now possible to utilize the same device to accomplish both voice processes and traditional RF scanning processes.

2.       It does not work in the language spoken by warehouse staff.

With HighJump Software’s voice solution, warehouse workers can speak to the device in any language they choose. The recognition technology will respond to spoken commands in any language. Additionally, HighJump Software’s WMS Warehouse Management System is fully internationalized so warehouse employees can be prompted in any of the languages supported in the system.

3.       I don’t need a WMS if I have a voice picking system.

Voice enablement is a standard feature in a best of breed WMS Warehouse Management system. The voice technology allows multiple processes such as picking, cycle counting, and put-away to be automated with voice-based interaction with users. A voice system does not optimize all functions within a warehouse and assign warehouse work in the most optimal way. In addition, a best of breed WMS expands beyond the four walls of the distribution center to integrate with suppliers (supplier enablement/supplier integration) and customers. These extended features are not found in voice enablement technology.

4.       Voice picking systems simply voice-enable RF prompts.

Most distribution professionals focus too much on the voice technology and not enough on the process differences between traditional RF prompting and voice prompting. Interacting with a text based interface can be completely different than interacting with a voice system. Workflows often need to be optimized for a voice environment. This often means reducing the number of commands spoken and shortening operator response. There is also a different approach to validation because bar code scanning is often minimized in voice environments. 

5.       My distribution center is too small for voice.

Voice technology is not just for the “big boys” any more. Simplified WMS integrations make voice implementation straight forward for the end customer. The emergence of multi-modal hardware solutions also mean that distribution centers with smaller teams can have team members easily move between voice enabled processes and non-voice processes. Voice technology represents a strong ROI for any distribution professional who wishes to improve productivity, accuracy and the safety of warehouse employees. 

Dan Radunz
Dan has a 13 year history with HighJump Software.  He moved up through the organization from software developer, to team leader, to Director of Technical Development Services.  Dan is a guru when it comes to the Advantage Platform, HighJump’s unique platform for supply chain technology that is highly adaptable and flexible.  I’ve had the privilege to listen to Dan speak of customers and prospective customers about the technology features of the Advantage Platform.  He has a knack for explaining highly technical concepts in a simple manor and can go deep in the weeds with the most technical audience members.  Dan will bring this technology leadership to the Direct Store Delivery Software products as we move forward with making newly acquired platforms available to existing customers.  Dan will also be critical in advancing our agile development methods across the organization.  
    
Millions of Moms, Millions of Flowers
Apparently, I wasn’t the only guy who found it easy delight my mother with a bouquet of flowers by placing an easy on-line order.  During the peak flower giving seasons of Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, a HighJump WMS warehouse management system customer ships millions of flowers in a very short time period (including my frequent orders).  The millions of WMS warehouse management system transactions required to support this volume are astonishing.  Only with supply chain logistic software that is benchmarked and proven to scale, is this type of operational volume accomplished.  It is a good feeling to know our software plays a critical role in these operations.
 

Have you ever anxiously awaited the results of an exam wondering if you had even received a passing grade? I must admit that there were a few electrical engineering courses in college where I hoped the “curve” put me into passing range. I had a similar feeling when reviewing HighJump Software’s direct to store delivery software capabilities against a list of “next generation” technology capabilities to support direct to store distribution processes.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association Information Systems/Logistics Distribution conference. The panel was chaired by Lora Cecere from AMR Research and consisted of leaders from several software companies that provide direct to stored delivery (DSD) software. 

The GMA has a committee of DSD manufacturers who have identified “next generation” technology capabilities to support their DSD processes. I will highlight a few of these next generation capabilities and explain what HighJump Software is providing in these areas.

In Store Survey Assessment for Competitive Information – in Mary 2008, HighJump Software launched HighJump™ Survey Management.   This new product integrates with existing HighJump mobile pre sell technology and allows competitive information to be collected in the field and analyzed at headquarters by sales and marketing professionals. 

Return and accounting for marketing materials, coolers, display units – management of non-product assets in the direct to store delivery supply chain is critical. These items could be point of purchase merchandising materials, branded coolers, or beer tap handles. In the battle for consumer mind share, the proper tracking and delivery execution of these materials is as important as the product itself. HighJump’s route accounting systems (RAS) have capabilities to manage and track these promotional materials.

Near real time synch – significant technology advancement has occurred in this area. As rugged mobile computers have advanced with cellular data connectivity, the ability to leverage real time information in the direct to store delivery process has increased. With HighJump direct to store delivery solutions, the mobile workforce has the ability to view inventory and place orders in real time. Additionally, with the HighJump™ Usable GPS management can gain real time visibility to the location of their mobile workforce and view progress against a previously scheduled route. 

Based on these emerging trends in direct to store delivery technology, I would have to say that HighJump Software receives a passing grade (likely better than just passing). It seems that our over 500 direct to store delivery customers have helped steer our product in the right direction.