Track and Trace Part One - Changing the Courier Industry with Mobile Data

The loneliness of a long distance futurist

On Sunday evening, I had the privilege of attending the red carpet premiere of a film created by 150 students from Titirangi School to celebrate the school’s sesquicentennial. There’s a word you don’t hear very often. I will post more about this in a few days when a YouTube link is published for the video.

Titirangi School is special to me and influenced the directions my career journeys would take. This is something I posted when I was invited to be interviewed for the film:

“If anyone is left from the halcyon days of my youth, I have to share that we are still a long way from the predictions that came off the Gestetner in the 1960s in the form of a document called A Blueprint for Survival, which predicted that by the year 2,000, robots and AIs would be doing all the drudge work and our problems would be what to do with our leisure time.”

Do you remember Zager and Evans? They were a one-hit wonder with In the Year 2525, although the flip side of the single, called Little Kids, was also a good song. Fairly prophetic too given our current experiences with climate change.

“In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing”

I was already reading Science Fiction at the time. My father was a big fan and in the 1960s, great writers were predicting futures that captured my imagination, so combining my reading with what I was promised at Primary School, I have spent much of my life trying to hasten the adoption of technologies that I thought would help us get to that nirvana of being able to focus on the higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Tait Electronics - Pioneers in Telecommunications

A couple of years after I joined the sales team at Tait Electronics, the company was producing a number of leading technologies in the 2-way radio space. It was the early days of telemetry.

We were a pioneer in the motor-racing industry. One of our customers was a car dealer by the name of Nikki Begovic. He was probably the country’s biggest motor racing fan. He had a room full of videotapes of motor racing from around the world, and he could commentate and give you factoids about every race he had seen.

Nikki came to us with the idea that if you could get information from the race car while it was on the track, you could better understand its performance and what tweaks or repairs you might need to do when it came into the pits.

We had some experience with traffic cop motorbikes, where the cables to the microphone and horn speaker had to travel past the engine, which induced hash, or static, making it hard for the officer to communicate, while riding his bike.

There were only a couple of us at Tait who rode motorbikes, and I loved taking them out for a road test on the motorway. It was important because nothing annoyed the cops more than taking a new bike out and not being able to hear the radio. I admit to having taken some of them out a few more times than was necessary. They were a lot of fun to ride.

So we were well placed to help Nikki in his goal to win a title at the Benson & Hedges 500. Sadly he didn’t win any of the races, but he was a great driver and fan. In the first year, he convinced Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark to come over and co-drive with him. I think it was the following year that he drove with the famous Dick Johnson, which we again sponsored.

Nikki Begovic on the left and Mark Thatcher leaning on the car

The Brits were great motor racing fans, including Beatle, George Harrison. You might not have heard this song before.

I was a fan of motor racing myself and was often a flag marshall at Pukekohe Race Course, as a member of the Auckland Motorcycle Club.

Getting paid to go out and help test the telematics on the V8s was cool, as were the hot laps!

Today we take telematics for granted in motor racing The pit crew receives everything from tyre pressures and temperature to the heart rate of the driver. The tech was pioneered in places like Auckland New Zealand.

Motivated by working smarter rather than harder, which became one of my catchphrases, I looked for other ways to use technology to increase productivity and profit. Finding arguments to use 2-way radio was easy, but I had a bigger vision.

Proof of Delivery for Couriers

Now that we were transmitting data over the radio, I wanted to take it a step further. Castle Parcels was one of several courier clients I had, who had a terrible system of tracking pickups and deliveries. They used sticky tickets, of different sizes and colours which denoted the charge for, and proof of the delivery.

Often you would see a busy courier with stickers all over their clothes, rushing from one site to the next.

At the end of each day they had to sort all of the Proof of Delivery stickers and put them into their pay claims. If the stickers fell off or were lost, they would not get paid for the job.

Then there was track and trace. The radio channel was non-stop due to customers phoning despatch, asking where their package was, and then being put on hold while the courier was contacted via the RT. Then they would have to wait, while the courier stopped their truck to confirm they had the parcel, or if it had been delivered, often advising that it had been delivered, but not to the person who was chasing it.

One driver, Rob, told me just the stickers added an hour’s work to each day alone. They often remembered where they had been, but couldn’t find the stickers, and unless they discovered them in the truck, they wouldn’t get paid for those jobs.

I developed a plan. What if we could do mobile data over the RT? We could have mobile printers in the trucks and a system to log deliveries as they were made. This could also be used to send specific instructions to people in the field in all sorts of industries including freight, construction and maintenance, and service.

I started by talking to my biggest clients, who all thought it was a great idea and worth paying a premium for. I worked with companies like Datacraft and we ran a test sending information to a truck and printing out a manifest on a 12-volt printer, which worked really well.

I put together a professional business case (which I still have in one of my storage bins), identifying the costs, and returns, together with letters from clients saying they were keen to pay the premium for the hardware and software to use this service. I documented a sales and marketing plan, budgets and ROI.

I took this information to the Managing Director of Tait Electronics at the time, AD McMurray, who told me in no uncertain terms that I had wasted my time. There was no market for mobile data. The killer app according to him was voice. My proposal was shut down and I had to go and tell my clients who wanted the solution, that it wasn’t going to happen.

That was the first nail in the coffin of my stellar career (not joking, I made them and myself a lot of money, which got us into our first home at a time when mortgage interest rates were 21%) due to our leader. The second nail was after acting Sales Manager in Auckland for most of a year, that same Andrew McMurray refused to give me the permanent Sales Manager role, because “we would lose our best rep”.

Guess what? Six weeks later, I was a Sales Supervisor for RC Dimock and Co.