Curbside Laundries Wash-Dry-Fold Mobile Web Application

Curbside Laundries was created when the owners of Super Suds Laundromat were looking for Point-of-Sale software to automate their growing wash-dry-fold and laundry delivery service. When their search was not fruitful, they turned to Marathon to investigate the possibility of using the IT company's custom application development skills to handle their requirements. 

Challenge

As a result of enhancements to their website, SuperSuds experienced tremendous growth with their pickup and delivery service. SuperSuds managed these services with a paper ticketing system and manual route planning for 2 years. As this business continued to grow, the manual systems were not capable of scaling to meet the demand. They started encountering problems with illegible handwriting, missed pickups and deliveries, and lost laundry that were affecting their customers’ satisfaction.

Solution

Marathon proposed to develop a mobile-friendly web application to manage the pickup and delivery process from start to finish. The web application provides public-facing pages for customers to sign up for the service and authenticated pages to place and manage orders. It also provides authenticated pages for staff users, such as the laundry attendants and drivers, to manage their work. The application is mobile optimized for use with both mobile phones and tablets.

The application enforces business rules so that all orders follow the same process and that required information is obtained from the customer initially. It automates as much of the process as possible to prevent human error from affecting the successful execution of an order. The application attempts to rectify problems automatically if possible and, where not possible, communicates with staff.

This solution provided Curbside with the following benefits:

  • An efficient way of taking and managing orders that could handle future growth without substantially increasing oversight and manual intervention.
  • An increase in customer satisfaction due to eliminating errors from the manual processes.
  • An increase in profit margin due to the increase in their most profitable service.
  • A holistic view of the order pipeline to aid in planning and scheduling staff.
  • A real-time view of the order pipeline to easily identify problem areas and initiate corrective action.