Quicksilver Messenger Service
Business Scenario
The Quicksilver Messenger Service was originally incorporated in 1983 as a bicycle messenger
service in downtown St. Louis. In 1991 a second office was opened in the Central West End to
service the medical complex there. A third bicycle hub office was opened in 1996 servicing the
Clayton business district. Additionally, that year Quicksilver expanded their services to include
auto and van messenger service covering most of St. Louis County. The dispatching hub for the
auto and van service was in Clayton because of its central location in the county.
The bicycle messengers’ pick-ups and deliveries are scheduled out of the three hub offices in
Downtown, the Central West End, and Clayton. All auto and van pick-ups and deliveries are
scheduled out of the Clayton hub. Customer calls are routed to the appropriate hub through an
automated phone menu system. Each hub has its own phone number but all of them are routed
through similar call handling switches that are not presently connected. Occasionally, a bicycle
hub incorrectly receives a customer request that should be handled by the auto and van hub or
vice versa. In that event, the dispatcher captures the customer’s request and routes the
information to the appropriate hub for messenger dispatching.
Quicksilver tracks the messengers, customers and the deliveries using Oracle databases running
on Windows NT servers at each hub. The dispatchers can interact with the database through a
Visual Basic graphical interface. This system was developed in 2001 and has served the
company well over the years.
The messengers and dispatchers communicate with each other using wireless phones. When a
messenger makes a pick-up or a delivery, he calls in and reports what he is doing and the
dispatcher gives him any new instructions. Messengers can be diverted to handle priority
requests by the dispatcher calling with the new request and the messenger responding. This
priority divert process isn’t considered very safe because a messenger may receive a call while
she is negotiating traffic and can’t answer immediately. Additionally, the only time dispatchers
have a good fix on where a given messenger is when the messenger calls in. Otherwise the
dispatcher is guessing if a messenger can service a priority call.
Quicksilver’s owners feel that this is a good time to make a significant change in their dispatching
system that will take advantage of current technology, centralize operations, optimize the
messenger routes, and increase profitability. Some changes that are on their wish list are:
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Consolidate the dispatching hub operations in Clayton.
Optimize messenger dispatching so that dispatcher can divert messengers to pick-up
additional packages if that are near their assigned route.
Provide messengers a wire-less device providing voice, e-mail, messaging, and GPS
location and map services.
Track customer requests and provide quantity discounts and customer-scheduling
services.
Develop a Drop Box service that would facilitate messenger-to-messenger package
transfers.
Provide customers a web-based interface to create and maintain their customer account,
schedule package pick-ups, track package deliveries, and track their business history
with Quicksilver.
Quicksilver’s current Information Technology (IT) staff consists of five people. Two individuals act
as Systems/Database Administrators. They are responsible for the servers, the Oracle
databases, the Visual Basic user interfaces applications, and the computer networks at each of
the hub locations. Two other individuals act the company’s telecommunications staff maintaining
the phone system and the internal switch software. The fifth individual is the IT department
manager.
The company’s management recognizes that this is an ambitious project. They are willing to
constrain the scope of the initial development and phase other portions of the project over time if
that helps constrain project costs, can provide a systematic implementation, or buys time for
technology maturation.