Our hackathon project, Autonomous, solves a problem that every local service provider has: automatically monitoring, scheduling, and routing workers to customers as efficiently as possible. Autonomous is useful for many types of businesses, including home cleaning services, food delivery, drivers, and service technicians. Autonomous tightly integrates with Salesforce, using the Salesforce iOS mobile SDK, Force.com REST APIs, Heroku, and Chatter.
From the Autonomous iPhone app, workers can see their schedule for the day, including both job details and customer data. Their schedule is organized to minimize travel time (using our algorithms and Google Maps' traffic data). When a worker marks a job as complete, Autonomous generates a post on Chatter for later discussion. As new jobs are placed via the Autonomous API, customers receive an SMS confirmation with an appointment time, and worker schedules dynamically update.
While workers are on the ground, the Autonomous iPad app is the executive's source of truth, showing a dashboard of key stats about their business' quality of service. These stats include orders fulfilled, late jobs, and the number of free hours in their workforce. From the Autonomous app, an executive can look at worker schedules for any day in the coming week.
With Autonomous, anyone can provide local services without hiring a human dispatcher. Autonomous takes care of physically connecting workers with customers, so local businesses just need to focus on providing great customer service.
