RESTON, VA (Q3, 2005) Nextel Retail Services, with over 100 Retail Account Executives (RAE) is
responsible for managing all national retail locations (i.e. Walmart, etc.). This includes the display, inventory
control, collateral materials, relationship building with store management and more. As Nextel started to
place more efforts on expanding its retail presents nationally, both the workload and the management
surrounding this fast growing division was becoming more challenging.
A Regional Director of National Retail suggested that implementing a national wireless data solutionmight
help automate several aspects of these services. The idea was to use Nextel’s own wireless data network to
collect store data in real time, build a variety of triggers and thresholds around this data in an attempt to
increase productivity, decrease costs, and position Nextel to ensure this highest possible number of new
sales in this indirect channel. This would be accomplished by improved inventory control, enhanced
customer service to the retailer, more effective display environments, improved marketing research, etc.. The
Solution would be segmented into three specific areas.
First, a customized hand held form would be developed to accommodate all information in which
management wanted to collect. This would replace the paper forms in which were currently being used to
collect data and for later impute into a computer by hand. For example, when an RAE would launch the
application on their phone, the wireless form would walk the RAE through a series of questions about
inventory, collateral, marketing, store detail, etc. A variety of Motorola phones provisioned with both GPS
capabilities and Sun Microsystems Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) operating system were used in this
project.
