TEMPLE, Texas -- The monitoring capabilities of McLane’s Delivery Tracker mobile app are being complemented by a new corporate-level app, Where’s My Truck.
The new tracking app is a web-based reporting tool that allows headquarters to see all deliveries taking place across the chain. Where’s My Truck includes a schedule function that can be used for historical purposes and measurements.
“One of the performance indicators a lot of retailers use on evaluating their wholesaler is, are you on time? Are you bringing the products that I want? So this is an important solution for them to gauge performance and make sure we’re doing what we need to do within the delivery window,” said Deon Johnson, vice president of consumer technology for McLane, Temple, Texas.
Click through for more details on Where’s My Truck and its abilities …
Where’s My Truck allows the corporate office to transfer the app’s data into Excel or a scheduler, which they can use to evaluate a delivery truck’s progress. The app also pings the location of every delivery, in real time, every 30 minutes. This allows headquarters to accurately track orders while they’re happening and evaluate their performance with the proper data once the delivery is complete.
With Where’s My Truck, the head office has more ways to accurately examine problems and introduce solutions if retail locations report issues with deliveries. If used correctly, the tool could be used to reduce costs by improving efficiency and allowing users to discover problems with deliveries faster.
Users of the Where’s My Truck app can track deliveries through an interactive map, and gain access to a slew of information about each individual delivery, including the telephone number of the division, the delivery’s current estimate time of arrival, the delivery-window time, the driver’s name and the status of the delivery.
The app builds on the capabilities of Delivery Tracker, a free app available for Apple or Android mobile devices. Unlike Where’s My Truck, which is a corporate-level tool, Delivery Tracker is a store-level app for each location to retrieve details about when a specific delivery is being made. Delivery Tracker lets users utilize GPS to track truck locations. The app is a time data provider that can alert store-level staff when unexpected delays such as traffic stall deliveries. This way, a store can see if a delivery will be delayed and make appropriate change to its labor force, potentially saving the retailer time and money.
Johnson said Where's My Truck will be added as a link in McLane Link, an online portal that allows retailers access to key information such as order activity and operational metric data.
McLane Link and the mobile-app tools are intuitive and easy to use, according to Johnson, who said that the convenience-store industry’s high turnover rate demands tools that can be taught quickly.
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