Optimizing Meal Delivery with IoT: A Case Study on Essential Meal Delivery
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Gateways
Applicable Industries
- Glass
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Last Mile Delivery
- Vehicle Telematics
About The Customer
Essential Meal Delivery is a healthy meal delivery company based in Etobicoke, Toronto, Canada. The company was founded in 2010 with the idea of providing work-life balance to its customers. The company serves meals to discerning professionals and has experienced steady growth since its inception. However, as the business expanded, it faced challenges in managing meal deliveries efficiently. The company initially allowed customers to select meals, but this approach turned into a paperwork nightmare as the business grew. The company sought a solution to these challenges and ultimately chose Upper to help streamline its delivery routes and improve its operations.
The Challenge
Essential Meal Delivery, a healthy meal delivery company based in Toronto, Canada, was founded in 2010 with the goal of providing work-life balance to its customers. Initially, the company experienced steady growth, serving around 400 meals weekly to professionals. However, as the business expanded, managing meal deliveries efficiently became increasingly complex. The initial approach of letting customers select meals turned into a paperwork nightmare. They used to plan routes manually using Google Maps and Mapquest, which was only efficient for planning routes with up to 5 stops. When they needed to plan routes with 15-20 stops, drivers wasted over an hour from their 3-hour shift and still couldn’t find the best route to follow. This problem was consuming three precious resources: time, fuel, and manpower. Additionally, the routing software used by the company experienced issues where certain features would malfunction over time, making it difficult to track drivers or determine the number of completed deliveries.
The Solution
To overcome these challenges, Essential Meal Delivery turned to Upper, a route planning and optimization platform. Upper’s route optimization feature helped the company transition from manually planning 5 addresses with Google Maps or MapQuest to efficiently optimizing routes with 20-30 stops in a click. This feature ensured that drivers could complete their deliveries within a strict 3-hour time window, covering up to 120 kilometers. Upper not only reduced operational costs but also enhanced delivery speed and accuracy. Upper’s driver tracking allowed the company to keep an update on the whereabouts of the drivers and the status of the deliveries they are responsible for. With the customer notification feature, customers received notifications about when to expect their meal deliveries, setting clear expectations and minimizing inquiries. This feature significantly improved customer satisfaction. Additionally, the importing feature enabled the company to import CSV files without the need to modify them, saving hundreds of dollars on developer fees.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Airport SCADA Systems Improve Service Levels
Modern airports are one of the busiest environments on Earth and rely on process automation equipment to ensure service operators achieve their KPIs. Increasingly airport SCADA systems are being used to control all aspects of the operation and associated facilities. This is because unplanned system downtime can cost dearly, both in terms of reduced revenues and the associated loss of customer satisfaction due to inevitable travel inconvenience and disruption.
Case Study
IoT-based Fleet Intelligence Innovation
Speed to market is precious for DRVR, a rapidly growing start-up company. With a business model dependent on reliable mobile data, managers were spending their lives trying to negotiate data roaming deals with mobile network operators in different countries. And, even then, service quality was a constant concern.
Case Study
Digitize Railway with Deutsche Bahn
To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.
Case Study
Cold Chain Transportation and Refrigerated Fleet Management System
1) Create a digital connected transportation solution to retrofit cold chain trailers with real-time tracking and controls. 2) Prevent multi-million dollar losses due to theft or spoilage. 3) Deliver a digital chain-of-custody solution for door to door load monitoring and security. 4) Provide a trusted multi-fleet solution in a single application with granular data and access controls.
Case Study
Vehicle Fleet Analytics
Organizations frequently implement a maintenance strategy for their fleets of vehicles using a combination of time and usage based maintenance schedules. While effective as a whole, time and usage based schedules do not take into account driving patterns, environmental factors, and sensors currently deployed within the vehicle measuring crank voltage, ignition voltage, and acceleration, all of which have a significant influence on the overall health of the vehicle.In a typical fleet, a large percentage of road calls are related to electrical failure, with battery failure being a common cause. Battery failures result in unmet service agreement levels and costly re-adjustment of scheduled to provide replacement vehicles. To reduce the impact of unplanned maintenance, the transportation logistics company was interested in a trial of C3 Vehicle Fleet Analytics.
Case Study
3M Gains Real-Time Insight with Cloud Solution
The company has a long track record of innovative technology solutions. For example, 3M helps its customers optimize parking operations by automating fee collection and other processes. To improve support for this rapidly expanding segment, 3M needed to automate its own data collection and reporting. The company had recently purchased the assets of parking, tolling, and automatic license plate reader businesses, and required better insight into these acquisitions. Chad Reed, Global Business Manager for 3M Parking Systems, says, “With thousands of installations across the world, we couldn’t keep track of our software and hardware deployments, which made it difficult to understand our market penetration.” 3M wanted a tracking application that sales staff could use to get real-time information about the type and location of 3M products in parking lots and garages. So that it could be used on-site with potential customers, the solution would have to provide access to data anytime, anywhere, and from an array of mobile devices. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M, upped the ante by volunteering to deliver the new app in one weekend. For Fox and his team, these requirements meant turning to the cloud instead of an on-premises datacenter. “My first thought was to go directly to the cloud because we needed to provide access not only to our salespeople, but to resellers who didn’t have access to our internal network,” says Fox. “The cloud just seemed like a logical choice.”
