Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd

Fujitsu Asia Among Top Winners In Inaugural e-Society Excellence Awards

Food-Trek Delivery Monitoring System for Food-From-The-Heart Initiative Honoured

Singapore, 23 March 2005 — Leading regional IT and communications solutions provider Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd today emerged among the top five winners in the inaugural e-Society Excellence Awards co-organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore and the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation.

The only IT vendor among the top five winners, the world’s third-largest IT services provider won for Food-Trek, a delivery tracking system developed for the Food-From-The-Heart (FFTH) voluntary food distribution program.

The system allows FFTH to monitor the island-wide collection and delivery of unsold bread and pastries from participating bakeries to the less fortunate.

Implemented in February 2003, Food-Trek allows staff at the FFTH office – located in Goldhill Centre along Thomson Road – to track all kinds of data pertaining to the delivery of food items, as sent by volunteers via short messaging service (SMS) while traversing Singapore.

Upon delivering unsold food from a bakery to a destination, the volunteer sends a text message to the Food-Trek server with details including:

• the name of the bakery
• a bakery-issued delivery order
• the type and quantity of food item(s) delivered
• a code indicating the FFTH-specified route between the bakery and the destination

Upon receiving the text messages, the Food-Trek server updates FFTH’s database and allows office staff to plan the collection and delivery of food items, based on supply and demand levels that fluctuate on a daily basis. Food-Trek also allows FFTH to optimise the use of limited resources such as volunteers and transport vehicles.

“We are extremely grateful to Fujitsu for developing Food-Trek based on our operating requirements, and modifying it based on our changing needs. The modifications allowed us to retrieve information like average mission times, actual and average quantities of food items handled as well as warnings of over- or under-supply. Thanks to this system, we are able to fully account for the food donations we received, which has given us immense credibility,” said Ms Christine Laimer, founder of FFTH.

“We started using Food-Trek when we commenced our collection and delivery efforts in early 2003. The reports generated by the system helped us to fine-tune delivery routes, as initially we did not know how many items to expect from each participating bakery. Our aim was to deliver an amount just sufficient for every recipient, and to avoid any oversupply which would lead to wastage again,” she added.

Thanks to the exact reports on supply and demand quantities that Food-Trek churned out, FFTH were able to ramp up the scale of their operations over time.

As of February 2005, the number of participating bakeries stood at 120, with deliveries made to 95 charity homes (with an estimated 10,000 residents in total) and 1,000 needy residents. In comparison, 21 bakery outlets and about 20 charity homes (with approximately 2,000 residents in all) participated in the debut run during February 2003.

Food-Trek presently supports over 2,000 registered users who are FFTH volunteers performing delivery rounds. The server handles at least 200 SMS messages daily and is operational virtually every day, except when participating bakeries are not open for business (during the Chinese New Year holidays, for instance). On the average, more than 20,000 kg of unsold bread is delivered – and accurately tracked – each month.

Mr Victor Yue, Director of the Mobile Solutions Centre at Fujitsu Asia, said: “Without a mobile tracking system, it would be a mammoth task for Food-From-The-Heart to coordinate and track the delivery of the bread and pastries to homes all over Singapore. Fujitsu Asia is happy and honoured to provide Food-Trek for such a worthwhile cause. This award proves that Fujitsu’s IT solutions can play a major part in Singapore’s evolution into an e-Society, and can be deployed for charity uses in addition to economic gain.”

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About Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd

Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd was established in Singapore in 1997 to provide leadership in business development, technology innovation and customer support as regional headquarters for the Fujitsu group of companies in Asia outside of Japan. Building on Fujitsu's three decades of experience in Singapore and the broader Asian region and with a pool of highly skilled engineering talent, Fujitsu Asia is dedicated to providing comprehensive integrated IT, telecommunications and networking solutions that deliver tangible business value and enable customers to meet the challenges of the new global economy. Fujitsu Asia is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tokyo-based Fujitsu Limited (TSW: 6702), a leader in customer-centric IT and communications solutions for the global marketplace.
For more information, please see: sg.fujitsu.com

About Food-From-The-Heart

Food-From-The-Heart is a voluntary food distribution programme initiated by Henry and Christine Laimer, a couple from Vienna who have made Singapore their second home. They were keen to start a meaningful charity project in Singapore, and news reports on bakeries throwing away unsold bread provided the inspiration for this project. It is hoped that both the bakeries and charitable organisations will benefit from this programme, and that this programme will be sustainable for the long term.

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