PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED:
How many nights have you starved in libraries, wondering if you should place an order for pizza or Chinese food? How many times have you waited over half an hour for an order to arrive? How many times have you wanted to place a delivery order but only to find out that the restaurant doesn’t deliver? The problem with the current food delivery mechanism is that from time to time, service provided by the limited number of driver that restaurants have cannot meet the demand of hungry consumers. One of the underlying reason for this phenomenon to occur is that restaurants do not make as much money when they have to hire dedicated drivers. Therefore, many small or medium-scale restaurants either do not offer delivery at all or keep its driver force at the minimum scale.
EXISTING SOLUTIONS:
Many people have attempted to solve this problem by providing an alternative to store-managed delivery. For example, Grubhub is a website where you can place an order on a certain number of restaurant and the website owner has organized delivery forces to bring the food from those restaurants to the consumers. However, whether the restaurant owners or a third party hires the drivers to deliver food, many avoidable delays can still occur. The most obvious delay occurs when consumer places an order, and the restaurant or a third-party delivery provider does not have an available driver. Under this type of situations, restaurants usually allow consumers to place the order without alerting them about the possible delay, and the situation usually ends up having consumers to wait for extended time.
OUR SOLUTION:
Imagine the convenience if you can simply post a list of dishes along with a specified amount of tip, and someone who is currently eating at the restaurant may bring a take-out directly to you. ROC (Rochester Online Community) is a website in the form of a forum, where members can exchange resources over a number of areas. Currently, we focus on providing the capability of allowing members to freely post and pick up orders of food delivery. The mechanism is fairly straightforward. To post an order, a member of the community needs to provide the requested time of delivery, items of the order, and the amount of tip that a drive will receive upon fulfillment. After that, the order goes online as a post that is visible to all members of the community. A member who is in the vicinity of the target restaurant or craves the tip can choose to pick up the order and fulfill the delivery. Our proposal is better because it allows everybody at University of Rochester who owns a car to be a potential service provider. In terms of incentive, we believe that monetary tip from people who place orders on our website is not the only incentive to keep our drivers moving. We are also considering to implement an independent reward system, which allows our drivers to earn reward points every time they complete a delivery. The reward points can be used to redeem coupons or other cash-equivalents from local merchants. Furthermore, by providing service to other students, members of ROC can meet new people and broaden their social network. U of R students are everywhere, and we come and go all the time. ROC utilizes this resource of community to create value for everyone.
OUR MARKET POSITION:
Starting from the beginning of drafting this proposal, we have received numerous, very helpful, and thoughtful feedbacks from the TAs and Professor Hoque. This section intends to clarify some of the common confusion that we have heard from our evaluators.
ROC is NOT a tool that is designed to replace the traditional delivery service all together. It merely serves as a reasonable alternative and supplement to the traditional delivery service provided either by the restaurants or third-party providers. Therefore, we are fully aware of situations where a post may remain “unanswered” for an extended period of time. We are still working on plausible solutions to this kind of situation. A possible (but will not necessarily be implemented) solution to forward the request to the target restaurant if the post remains unanswered for a certain amount of time (if the restaurant provides delivery).
How many nights have you starved in libraries, wondering if you should place an order for pizza or Chinese food? How many times have you waited over half an hour for an order to arrive? How many times have you wanted to place a delivery order but only to find out that the restaurant doesn’t deliver? The problem with the current food delivery mechanism is that from time to time, service provided by the limited number of driver that restaurants have cannot meet the demand of hungry consumers. One of the underlying reason for this phenomenon to occur is that restaurants do not make as much money when they have to hire dedicated drivers. Therefore, many small or medium-scale restaurants either do not offer delivery at all or keep its driver force at the minimum scale.
EXISTING SOLUTIONS:
Many people have attempted to solve this problem by providing an alternative to store-managed delivery. For example, Grubhub is a website where you can place an order on a certain number of restaurant and the website owner has organized delivery forces to bring the food from those restaurants to the consumers. However, whether the restaurant owners or a third party hires the drivers to deliver food, many avoidable delays can still occur. The most obvious delay occurs when consumer places an order, and the restaurant or a third-party delivery provider does not have an available driver. Under this type of situations, restaurants usually allow consumers to place the order without alerting them about the possible delay, and the situation usually ends up having consumers to wait for extended time.
OUR SOLUTION:
Imagine the convenience if you can simply post a list of dishes along with a specified amount of tip, and someone who is currently eating at the restaurant may bring a take-out directly to you. ROC (Rochester Online Community) is a website in the form of a forum, where members can exchange resources over a number of areas. Currently, we focus on providing the capability of allowing members to freely post and pick up orders of food delivery. The mechanism is fairly straightforward. To post an order, a member of the community needs to provide the requested time of delivery, items of the order, and the amount of tip that a drive will receive upon fulfillment. After that, the order goes online as a post that is visible to all members of the community. A member who is in the vicinity of the target restaurant or craves the tip can choose to pick up the order and fulfill the delivery. Our proposal is better because it allows everybody at University of Rochester who owns a car to be a potential service provider. In terms of incentive, we believe that monetary tip from people who place orders on our website is not the only incentive to keep our drivers moving. We are also considering to implement an independent reward system, which allows our drivers to earn reward points every time they complete a delivery. The reward points can be used to redeem coupons or other cash-equivalents from local merchants. Furthermore, by providing service to other students, members of ROC can meet new people and broaden their social network. U of R students are everywhere, and we come and go all the time. ROC utilizes this resource of community to create value for everyone.
OUR MARKET POSITION:
Starting from the beginning of drafting this proposal, we have received numerous, very helpful, and thoughtful feedbacks from the TAs and Professor Hoque. This section intends to clarify some of the common confusion that we have heard from our evaluators.
ROC is NOT a tool that is designed to replace the traditional delivery service all together. It merely serves as a reasonable alternative and supplement to the traditional delivery service provided either by the restaurants or third-party providers. Therefore, we are fully aware of situations where a post may remain “unanswered” for an extended period of time. We are still working on plausible solutions to this kind of situation. A possible (but will not necessarily be implemented) solution to forward the request to the target restaurant if the post remains unanswered for a certain amount of time (if the restaurant provides delivery).