How Tesco uses sat nav to deliver your shopping

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As a rule, the drivers remove all the devices from the van such as the PDA and their phone to reduce the risk of theft, so even adding a removable dedicated unit would have posed issues as it would be yet another item to carry.

"In certain environments, in some parts of London for example where it may be necessary to park the van some distance from the actual delivery point, or where you are delivering to a tower block which will involve leaving the van for some time out of view, this would be more of a security risk than elsewhere, where you may be able to park right outside the front door of the delivery address. In keeping with police advice we would rather not leave these items on display while the van was unattended, else they run the risk of windows being smashed and items being taken" said Higgins.

Tesco.com wanted to fully integrate the CoPilot application into its other Pocket PC application - called Reach - to maximise efficiency and to minimise the amount of rekeying of information that went on. As the Pocket PC device already has the address data on it in Reach, Tesco wanted to pass that information into the CoPilot application and begin plotting a route, rather than asking the driver to spend time manually inputting the data into the sat nav software.

With the two applications talking to each others, when the driver arrives at a delivery address, the CoPilot application drops to the background and the data capture app come to the fore to capture the delivery signature, removing the need to keep switching between applications and transferring information manually.

"Integration took just 12 weeks and was a very straightforward process" said Higgins. "We needed just two people from our store systems team working on the project. They worked closely with ALK and thanks to the development tools available, we found it simple to integrate the CoPilot software with our existing Reach application."

Higgins added that since deploying the CoPilot software to its drivers at the Croydon store, the delivery team is now far more efficient as less time is lost as a result of wrong turns and being stuck in traffic.

"One of the more useful side features of having sat nav in the vans is the ability to reroute around traffic as needed".

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