Process improvement starts with the smallest message

All businesses seek to improve their use of people and resources to grow revenues, reduce costs, serve customers better and do more of the right stuff.

One 2sms customer implemented a simple but effective solution to reduce costs, improve operations and ensure accurate deployment of drivers. Each day the customer sends text messages to van and lorry drivers on their books with their assignments for the next day. The messages are sent from an Excel spreadsheet at 6pm each evening, so that the drivers have their jobs to hand for the early morning start.

Once spreadsheet issues 500 daily jobs on average, taking less than one minute to dispatch the data.

The cost savings are substantial. No more telephone calls from Operations Managers to their fleet drivers, with all the problems associated with leaving voice-mails and not knowing if the message was delivered.

But the benefits do not stop there. By using the 2sms 2way service, any drivers who had issues with their instructions could text back their concerns. This allowed the customer to deal with the issues the night before, resolving problems before the start of the next business day.

The resulting improvements in customer satisfaction from happy customers receiving on time deliveries was fed back to all involved in this project.

The cost of sending these messages? Less than £200 a week. The cost of one vehicle left idle, or wrongly assigned? Multiples of SMS costs.

Return on investment : Instant.