January 12, 2006 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Technology developed by the U.S. Department of Defense to help ships and airplanes with navigation is now being used by the D.C. Central Kitchen to streamline its services.
The charity — which collects unserved food from local restaurants and other businesses to prepare 4,000 meals per day for 100 nonprofit groups in the greater Washington area — has been given 11 wireless phones equipped to tap into the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
Using the phones and Web-based tracking software, the charity is able to make sure its drivers’ routes include as little backtracking as possible.
Sprint Nextel, in Reston, Va., led the effort to help the charity, donating the phones and equipment to mount them in D.C. Central Kitchen’s trucks. It also recruited a company that it works with, TeleNav, in Santa Clara, Calif., to donate the tracking software.
Sprint Nextel estimates that the total value of the gift is more than $100,000.
Each of D.C. Central Kitchen’s trucks now has a phone, which sends data about its location every three minutes. At the end of the day, Frances Reed, the organization’s director of transportation, can run a “bread-crumb report” which traces the drivers’ exact paths.
Ms. Reed says those reports allow her to design more-efficient routes in a way that wasn’t possible before the group received the new technology.
“Right now I’ve got six drivers, seven days a week,” says Ms. Reed. “That’s 42 different routes, and that doesn’t take into account any extra routes that we might do. So it is mind-boggling to try to look route-by-route for criss-crosses if you can’t see them visually.”
The technology is also starting to change the way D.C. Central Kitchen dispatches drivers for special pickups or deliveries.
A few days after receiving the equipment, for example, the organization received a call from the Census Bureau, in Suitland, Md. A big retirement party was over, and there was a lot of leftover food, including two entire hams that hadn’t even been unwrapped. The bureau didn’t have anywhere to safely store the excess food, so D.C. Central Kitchen needed to pick it up within an hour to keep it from going to waste.
Ms. Reed was able to go to the tracking software to see where all of the drivers were at that moment, type in the address of the Census Bureau to see which truck was closest, and then call that driver to inform him of the new pickup — all while the woman from the Census Bureau was on hold.
In the past, Ms. Reed would have had to take the woman’s information, hang up, and then call each driver to ask where he or she was and how far away they thought they were from the new pickup location.
“People aren’t computers, so I would get very flawed data from their heads,” says Ms. Reed.
“And then add in that people don’t always want to go back in where they just came from, so they’d say, ‘Oh, I’m way far away from that,’ she adds. “This gives me real data.”
The new system also has the capability to give drivers spoken directions as they drive to a location.
For more information: Go to http://www.dccentralkitchen.org/news.
