How Tesco uses sat nav to deliver your shopping

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In-car sat nav technology is about more than replacing paper maps and local road knowledge, smart use and integration of the technology can also produce significant productivity gains for a business and its users.

One such example of this is supermarket chain Tesco and its online grocery shopping and delivery service. With several million registered customers, Tesco.com processes more than 4,000 orders an hour, generating sales of over £1 billion in its last financial year. Tesco.com delivery drivers cover most of the country, delivering groceries to customers within pre-defined delivery time windows, leaving little margin for error if drivers get lost or stuck in traffic.

While most of its delivery drivers serve fairly small catchment areas - typically, they delivered within a six to 10-mile radius of stores - and are able to rely on and develop their own knowledge of streets and locations of regular customers, the drivers operating out of the company's Croydon delivery store have to serve a much wider area, encompassing almost half of London.

The Croydon store is not your typical Tesco supermarket. While it looks, operates and is restocked like a conventional store, it is closed to the public and filled with trained pickers, the sole job of which is to pick and pack groceries for home delivery. The store is a departure from the past because, historically, pickers have fulfilled orders at Tesco stores close to the addresses of online customers. This store is more like a depot disguised as a conventional supermarket, but it is a formula that works and which fits in with Tesco's operational processes and supply chain system. It also allows the company to provide online delivery facilities to one of the most lucrative and demanding parts of the country.

However, servicing such a large delivery area can create problems for the drivers of the 78 delivery vans that operate out of the Croydon site. While very knowledgeable and capable, such a large delivery area demands London taxi driver knowledge which only comes through years of intensive training. In order to boost efficiency and productivity Tesco.com needed a solution to help its drivers plan their often long and complex routes while at the same time integrating the navigation software with existing applications and processes used for managing the delivery drivers and individual grocery deliveries.

Tesco opted for ALK's CoPilot Live software, using the Pocket PC version and installing it on the Pocket PC-based PDAs that the drivers already carry. The devices are used in place of many piece of paperwork and already have a docking station inside the cab of the delivery van.

"We already had a Pocket PC-based device set up in the cab of each van for capturing signatures, doing refunds and scheduling the order of their deliveries. The PDAs replace a mound of paperwork that the drivers would otherwise carry, so it made sense to make use of the existing hardware" said Jon Higgins, IT Director at Tesco.com.

There were also other operational and security considerations in using the existing PDA over a dedicated piece of hardware.

"The reasons we wanted to add a sat nav solution on to the Pocket PC device rather than add another device was that it added expense, especially if we went for a factory fitted sat nav solution, while a standalone unit raised security and theft issues if it were left unattended in the van while goods were being delivered" said Higgins.

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