With a population approaching 700 thousand, Seattle, also known as the “Emerald City”, is home to the Space Needle, the original Starbucks and the recent world champion Seattle Seahawks. And as is the case with every other US city, its citizens care about local, national and world news. That’s where the Seattle Times comes into play.
The Seattle Times is the trusted source for Pacific Northwest news, information and entertainment for people who care about thoughtful, independent journalism that impacts their community. Founded in 1896, The Seattle Times remains a family-owned business with deep roots in principled, investigative news coverage and service to the northwest Washington community.
Customer Challenge
For any organization that has a mobile workforce, it’s important to keep them “connected” in order for them to perform their job efficiently and accurately. It’s no different for the delivery drivers for The Seattle Times who are constantly traveling between newspaper vendors, delivering the new papers and collecting the unsold material from the day before.
The Seattle Times had a tablet solution in place to assist the drivers in documenting each delivery and pick-up, but those devices just weren’t meeting their standards. Device failures due to the weather and mishandling resulted in The Times seeking out replacement devices from a different vendor. That’s when they discovered MobileDemand.
MobileDemand Solution
After looking at and testing several different hardware vendors, The Seattle Times found that the MobileDemand xTablet Flex 10 was the ideal solution for their delivery drivers. The Windows 8 tablet fit in the existing vehicle mounts, is tough to withstand truck vibration and is sealed so no water can penetrate the device itself. Best of all, it runs their existing custom application so that no additional man-hours or funds were needed.
Results
Now their mobile workers have a reliable tablet to carry with them throughout the day, tracking how many of each newspaper they drop off and how many are picked out. This allows The Seattle Times to be more profitable by limiting the number of wasted papers and increasing their sales.
“MobileDemand worked with us from the initial call through delivery. They helped us select the tablet we needed and were always responsive in answering our questions,” said Rob Grutko, Director of Technology at The Seattle Times. “We look forward to seeing more efficiency improvements across the board as a result of deploying these rugged Windows tablets.”