PepsiAmericas pours out Pocket PCs to top salespeople, drivers

Computerworld - PepsiAmericas Inc. has started a massive rollout of 4,000 rugged Pocket PCs to its sales force and delivery personnel along with two wireless systems, all part of a $16 million project the company believes will dramatically change how it does business.
Ken Johnsen, CIO at Minneapolis-based PepsiAmericas, said the new systems will allow the company's sales force to "presell" a growing array of products, input more timely, accurate data into back-end billing systems and create efficiencies in the bottler's 120 U.S. distribution centers.
PepsiAmericas -- the second-largest independent Pepsi bottler in the U.S., with a territory covering a large part of the Midwest and South -- plans to equip 1,500 of its salespeople with rugged Pocket PCs from Symbol Technologies Inc. in Holtsville, N.Y. The devices are expected to help its sales force presell and book orders for a growing line of products that include energy drinks, bottled water, Mountain Dew Red and various types of Pepsi.
In the past, route drivers would manually take orders from convenience and grocery store customers as they made deliveries. But as Pepsi and Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. introduce new drinks and compete for limited shelf space, beverage distributors have to move from order taking to the presell model because of increased competition, said Johnsen.
Once they receive an order, the sales force at PepsiAmericas will enter it into their Pocket PCs and transmit the information to PepsiAmericas' PeopleSoft-based back-end billing and shipping systems over a Cellular Digital Packet Data system operated by Verizon Wireless in Bedminster, N.J.
Johnsen declined to provide specific details on the returns that PepsiAmericas is anticipating from its $16 million mobile computing investment. But Kevin Burden, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said companies that deploy wireless mobile computing devices to support field service personnel can experience "a very high" return on investment.
Johnsen views the cellular wireless data system as the weak leak in this supply chain, complaining of the "poor coverage" offered by Verizon in some of the rural areas PepsiAmericas serves. The field sales force Pocket PCs are also equipped with dial-up modems as a fallback to cellular connectivity.
PepsiAmericas also has plans to field 2,500 Pocket PCs to route drivers who work out of 120 distribution centers. Johnsen said the driver system should bring new efficiencies to the company's distribution operations.
The Pocket PCs used by the drivers will be equipped with built-in 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, wireless LAN cards. Once a driver returns to a distribution center, the Pocket PC will start downloading order information, which