G-group e-shopping with drive-through (eWay): effective drive-through operation for eWay
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Date
2010
Authors
Huoi Ying, Guan
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Abstract
Customers purchase grocery from retail stores to fulfill living needs and requirements.
The current purchase model in Malaysia requires customers to walk in to the store to perform
purchase activity, predominantly referred to as traditional purchase store. In view of this, Ggroup
implements a product and service 'eWay' e-shopping with drive-through to resolve
problems of parking, item search from the aisle and long queue in retail store. Mainly, electronic
grocery shopping (EGS) from eWay can address these customer pains. Today the common
distribution model applied in retail businesses in the market are EGS with direct home delivery.
Some of the challenges still found in EGS with home delivery are preservation temperature
requirement, limited delivery window particularly. Thus, an yxploratory and new distribution of
EGS being suggested, it is EGS with drive-through. The features for the electronic shopping are
introduced in product or service development section for the solutions to customer problems.
Drive-through research is carried out for this new distribution of EGS. The research is effective
drive-through operation for eWay. Effective operational results carne from comprehensive
approach on technology, people and process. The attributed areas for technology, people and
process in contributing to the effectiveness was also studied and measured through the design
research methodology. The findings showed a feasible drive-through service with a total of eight
purchases in a customer order was able to be completed within five minutes from the work group.
The service time at the counter is clocked with the drive-through timer installed in the customer
collection booth counter based on the benchmark of 'QSR', Quick Service Restaurant service
time performance. It showed less than tive minutes of processing time for a customer's collection
from the collection booth counter. The result of the processing time shows that it was able to
meet the packages offered in e Way which is, Priority order requires to be fulfilled in one hour
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and the normal order in two hours. To achieve all this, Smart card system is used as a control
system to manage the car traffic in the drive-through lane and a warehouse is set up next to the
collection booth counter. Hence it can be concluded that effective drive-through operation can be
achieved through optimization of specific measurable service goals and technologies.
G-group, a family based of business comprises of three business shareholders, targets to
collaborate with hypermarket to launch eWay. The sales revenue for G-group is projected with
RM 269,373.50 in the first year, RM 1,446,530.00 and R..\1 3,434,269.50 on the second and third
year respectively.