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PALM IN THE REAL WORLD
How ServiceMaster and Greyhound manage quality with Palm devices
By Steve Niles
Ah, the joys of public transportation. What's not to love about bus travel, what with the stopovers, the disgruntled ticket booth attendants, the crying babies, and the creepy guys with the garbage bag luggage? However, if you ever find yourself traveling in the United States in a Greyhound bus like the one pictured in Figure A, know that your trip would be a good deal more unpleasant if not for the hard work of ServiceMaster employees.
FIGURE A
There's no better way to see the United States than traveling cross-country in a Greyhound.
Headquartered in Downers Grove, IL, ServiceMaster operates in more than 40 countries and serves over 10.5 million customers. They operate a broad network of quality services, including TruGreen-ChemLawn (lawn care and landscaping), Terminix (pest control), American Home Shield (home warranty services), ServiceMaster (heavy cleaning), Merry Maids (residential cleaning), Rescue Rooter (plumbing, drain cleaning, heating ventilation, and air conditioning maintenance and repair), Furniture Medic, and AmeriSpec.
It's thanks to them that we Greyhound passengers need not suffer the stink and clutter that naturally accumulates when several dozen of the appropriately-named "great unwashed" (you can't take a shower on a bus!) spend twenty hours trapped together in a confined space with one bathroom. You see, ServiceMaster has an account with the Greyhound Bus Company, and they're responsible for cleaning the fleet of Greyhound buses at 19 sites across the country. Once the cleaning process is complete, ServiceMaster must perform an inspection, the results of which are delivered to Greyhound.
In the past, a paper-and-pencil-based system was used in the inspection process. Supervisors would get on a bus and conduct an inspection, tally up scores, and then file it until the end of the week. They would then take out the file, compile the data, and make a report out of it. Information from all 19 sites would go to one unfortunate administrative assistant who would have to take the data and put it in an Access database and create whatever final reports the account manager wanted to provide to Greyhound.
When Greyhound expressed a desire to automate the inspection auditing procedure, the task was put to John Morrow, a support engineer for ServiceMaster, to come up with a solution. "To better serve the customer and to improve the process there was consideration given for using some sort of handheld device to collect and report," Morrow says. "Our initial look resulted in some pretty expensive solutions."
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