When Pilot Air Freight in Lima, Pennsylvania, entered the home delivery market, its first job was to retrain its staff. The reason is simple: home delivery is different from point-to-point trucking. It thrives on "white glove" service.

At Pilot, premium service involves setting up the merchandise, ensuring it works properly, removing the box and, sometimes, the old equipment. And, elaborates Richard Phillips, chairman, CEO and president, "We had to adjust to making calls and setting up appointments."

Cory's Home Delivery in Jersey City, New Jersey, goes as far as assembling large pieces in its warehouse to check for missing pieces before disassembling them for delivery. "Consumers are much more demanding than business customers," notes John Kelemen, director of Pilot's home delivery service.

Thinking Globally

Home delivery today involves more than trucking heavy items from a warehouse to a customer's home. Pilot, for example, transports goods from manufacturers to its own warehouses, sorts them, coordinates orders with local retailers and then delivers goods directly to the home.

As part of its move to broaden U.S. coverage and maximize efficiency, Cory Home Delivery Service contracts with independent truckers in eighteen states rather than maintaining its own fleet. Cory says that fewer than 10 percent of driver applications are accepted, and each driver then completes a 30-step training process. The result is a base of well-trained drivers and a lowered cost of doing business.

In contrast to the success of big ticket deliveries made by firms like Pilot, Cory and Exel Direct, home grocery deliveries have been fraught with failures, including Safeway's attempt. Safeway's home delivery service is back, however, with a proven business model and a new name, GroceryWorks.

GroceryWorks uses British partner Tesco's delivery model of picking items from store shelves during off-peak hours, says Mark Marymee, GroceryWorks' director of PR. "Customer orders go from the computer to a 'teampad' mounted on a trolley (cart)." GroceryWorks may substitute out-of-stock items to ensure the customer receives what is needed, and drivers can make further adjustments in the customers' homes.

The Tesco model seems to be working. Home delivery has spread from market entry at GroceryWorks' Pleasanton, California, headquarters to three hundred thirty West Coast cities.

Streamlining Logistics

For home delivery services, efficiency is the name of the game. ClickSoftware, Inc. in Burlington, Massachusetts, "...helps companies make deliveries as efficiently as possible," elaborates Click's Amit Bendov, senior vice president, product marketing, by optimizing scheduling and considering "...personnel's soft skills, seniority, technical expertise and even overtime."

Click's multilingual service optimization suite includes modules for scheduling and routing, long-term planning and staffing forecasts, field communications via cell phone and PDA and trend analysis. Early in 2003, Click also plans to release Click Forecast, to facilitate planning based on a combination of historical data, marketing campaigns, emerging markets and current growth rates.

For companies that do it right, the home delivery future looks bright.