Technology Category
- Sensors - Haptic Sensors
Applicable Industries
- E-Commerce
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Procurement
Use Cases
- Last Mile Delivery
- Personnel Tracking & Monitoring
About The Customer
Safeway is the second largest grocery chain in the U.S., with more than 2,200 stores and almost 200,000 employees. The company has a growing e-commerce division that offers grocery delivery services. However, the expansion of this service was hindered by the need to hire a large number of hourly workers, particularly delivery drivers, in a short span of time. Safeway's goal was to expand its delivery service from 8 states in 2015 to 18 states by the end of 2018. To achieve this, the company needed to hire about 20 drivers per week, a task made difficult by stiff competition for hourly workers from other retailers and on-demand companies.
The Challenge
Safeway, the second largest grocery chain in the U.S., was facing a significant challenge in expanding its grocery delivery business. With the rise in customer expectations for online grocery ordering and immediate delivery, Safeway was under pressure to compete with rivals like Whole Foods, Costco, and Instacart. The company's goal was to expand its delivery service from 8 states in 2015 to 18 states by the end of 2018. To achieve this, Safeway needed to hire a large number of hourly workers, specifically about 20 drivers per week. However, the process of hiring was impeded by stiff competition for hourly workers from both traditional retailers and rapidly expanding on-demand companies like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash. Safeway's existing hiring process, which involved using a shared email inbox to field inquiries, was inefficient and often resulted in missing key applicant information.
The Solution
Safeway turned to Fountain's software to streamline its hiring process and meet its ambitious expansion goals. Fountain's software replaced Safeway's shared email inbox system with a quick, 4-question interest form that was mobile-responsive. The responses were sent directly into the Fountain applicant tracking system, enabling Safeway recruiters to communicate quickly with applicants via email, text, and phone. This ensured that every applicant received an initial call from a recruiter on the same day or the next day. The software also eliminated the problem of missing applicant data. With Fountain's software, Safeway was able to hire hourly workers faster and less expensively, thereby overcoming one of the biggest impediments to growing its e-commerce business.
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.”