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11/01/05
Startup is on the Right Track
by Jerri Stroud
(reprinted from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO), NOV 01, 2005)
A casual conversation at a Priory soccer game led Daniel Huber and Greg Winter to develop software that monitors up to eight functions for businesses with workers on the move. Huber, 47, heads LADS Network Solutions Inc., which sells dispatching software for courier companies. Winter, 46, who was an engineer with Charter Communications Inc., said the cable company might be interested in using such a system if Huber could add a component that confirmed appointments for technicians.
After further conversations, the pair decided that rather than retrofitting LADS Network's software, they would design a system that was adaptable to a variety of industries. They also recruited Naeem Bari, 33, who was technology chief at another company, to help with software development.
In early 2004, Winter and Huber began raising money to start a new company, called Agilis Systems Inc. By August 2004, they had raised enough to begin working full time on the system, designed to help companies keep tabs on salespeople, utility workers, delivery fleets and similar businesses.
In a little over a year, Agilis has developed the software and signed up about 15 clients, including Schnuck Markets Inc., Laclede Gas Co. and Hertz Equipment Rental, as well as a small cable company based in Kansas. The company has a pilot project in Mexico tracking trucks for the state of Michoacan.
"It's highly configurable as opposed to custom programming," said Winter. Companies tell Agilis what they want to track, using phones or other devices with Global Positioning System capabilities. Agilis can adapt the software for many types of hardware as well as customers' legacy software systems. The turnaround time for a client can be quick. Huber said Agilis had the system running at Laclede within two days of receiving a purchase order. More complex monitoring may take longer to set up, Winter said, but seldom more than two weeks.
Hertz Equipment Rental uses the system to track deliveries of construction machinery to job sites, which may or may not have a physical address. Managers can track individual trucks on a Web-based map or get a report showing where a driver has been so far that day. In a pilot project in San Francisco, Agilis' software is tracking Hertz deliveries using a machine's serial number and the GPS coordinates at the site. The system tracks the hours the machine is used and how long it was at a customer's site. Hertz can pull the data into its system and generate a bill without paperwork.
Passage Events, a Seattle company that markets products at football games and other events, uses Agilis software to track customized vehicles it uses in promotions. The tracking data "gives us an additional sense of security that we know that someone who was supposed to be at an event was actually there," said Paul Benedetto, chief financial officer for Passage Events. The company wants to do even more monitoring for security of storage sites and to give clients the assurance that their products are being promoted as promised.
Schnuck Markets Inc. shaved 10 to 20 percent from the time its delivery trucks were on the road using Agilis' software, said Steve Carroll, transportation director for the grocery chain. Schnucks is tracking its drivers' activities and commodities they deliver using a cell-phone-based system. The system pulls data from the phones directly into a computer database, eliminating hand-written tickets that could sometimes be hard to read.
"We are able to track our drivers' productivity and exactly where they are in the delivery process," Carroll said. Drivers also can communicate with the stores and dispatch managers. They call ahead to make sure the store is ready to receive goods when they arrive, cutting down on waiting time. Maps on the phones keep drivers on course.
Customers retrieve information from Agilis' software on a Web site, so they don't need extra hardware to use it, Winter said. Some companies have opted to download the information to their own servers because they want to keep the tracking data on file. Agilis' servers store data for the most recent 90 days.
Agilis also gets a boost from Sprint, which refers customers who want to use GPS functions in Sprint or Nextel phones for employee or fleet monitoring to Agilis and other application developers. Other cell phone companies haven't given vendors like Agilis access to the GPS information on their phones, Huber said.
Agilis should be breaking even within a year, said Huber. The Creve Coeur company has 10 employees and is adding clients at a good clip. Agilis also is seeking a second round of financing. Huber said the company's initial plan called for monitoring 45,000 of its clients' workers or trucks within five years, but one potential client could put their total at nearly 90,000 soon. "In two or three years, we anticipate growing the company substantially beyond our business plan," Huber said.
Reprinted for web use with permission from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
© 2005 all rights reserved.
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