Every morning at Partsdirect.ru dozens of drivers and couriers stand in lines to the cashier’s desk: they need to hand in their delivery notes and cash from the previous day. Those who are not lucky enough to be among the first in the line, might stand there for up to 50 or 60 minutes. Muda (i.e. waste of resources) is evident here.
A natural impulse is to add more cahiers and create more lines. “Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good," as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, prince de Bénévent, used to say. He of all people knew what he was talking about. “Every problem has a simple, fast and wrong solution": hiring cashiers costs money, more so every month.
We offered another way, specifically – to install “electronic cashiers" – automatic payment kiosks.
Self-service kiosks are widely common, but here the task was a bit more complicated:
- beside simply accepting cash, we needed a mechanism to allocate cash to delivery documents from a specific driver (sometimes deliveries are unaccepted, or items are missing, or a customer refuses to take some of the goods, or they give more cash to cover a debt from an earlier delivery, etc.);
- considering fairly large amounts of cash brought each morning by every driver, they could spend a hell of a lot of time inserting it bill by bill, as is the case with the usual payment kiosks. We needed them to have a batch mode of accepting cash in stacks.
Essentially, these tasks were strictly technical and easily solved with installation of proper equipment and enrichment of e-Trade functionality.
As a result, the immediate expenses paid off in 3 months. Monthly savings of work time exceed 10 000 man hours. Drivers productivity (number of deliveries per day per driver) increased by 8%. Customer complaints about delivery delays decreased by a third.
As you can see, with e-Trade a good many of tasks become strictly technical. As a matter of fact, the same functionality and hardware may be applied to any business processes that involve accepting large volumes of cash from both employees and customers.
