The 'Uber of laundry' relies on this one tool to get to its customers faster

Americans spend billions of dollars every year in the name of convenience. Whether it's getting groceries delivered to their homes instead of braving the crowds at their local supermarket, or paying someone to clean their most intimate articles of clothing - saving time is a top priority.

It's no wonder then that convenience-driven companies, such as FlyCleaners - a 2-year-old, on-demand laundry and dry cleaning service in New York City - are growing faster than ever.

"A survey found that Americans' least favorite household chore, by far, is doing laundry." says Sloan Eddleston, FlyCleaners' chief operating officer. "It's manual, it's boring, and it's just a time suck. We set out to create a high-quality product that takes the pain out of laundry, so you can get back to doing the things you love to do."

Based in Brooklyn, the on-demand service, open every day from 6 a.m. to midnight, helps Manhattan and Brooklyn residents with all of their laundry and dry cleaning needs - without requiring them to ever leave their homes. Customers simply download the FlyCleaners app, request a pickup, and within 30 minutes can be greeted by a driver ready to take their laundry.

The company's fleet of 40 vans and team of 150 drivers handle more than 2,500 deliveries a week and are constantly responding to new requests from customers each hour, which leaves little room for delays or wrong directions. That's why the company relies heavily on location-based functionality to accurately calculate and optimize complex routes based on realtime traffic and mapping data. That's where the MapQuest GeoSpatial Toolkit comes in. FlyCleaners has worked with the service since its inception to ensure drivers receive the fastest and most convenient routes and, in turn, customers receive the fastest service.

"We send a million API [application program interface] calls to MapQuest every single week to make sure we're going to the right place at the right time, and to optimize how long it will take to get there," says Eddleston. The FlyCleaners app gives customers live estimates of pickup times and allows drivers to choose the fastest and most convenient routes.

"We selected MapQuest due to the robust data services they provide. Our business depends on serving as many customers per hour as possible and having the right data to power our algorithm is critical," Eddleston adds. "MapQuest helps ensure that we're going to the next closest customer, rather than across town."

Despite having a number of geospatial providers to choose from, the on-demand service believes MapQuest caters to its needs in a number of ways that competitors couldn't.

"We looked through many different fleet-management solutions and MapQuest gives us the flexibility that we need, while allowing us to give customers the in-app experience that we want," says Alex Sinelnikov, FlyCleaners' technology director. "MapQuest gave us the flexibility, data quality, and service integrity that we were looking for."

In many ways, FlyCleaners' business with MapQuest goes far beyond a client-provider-relationship. The two are constantly working together to find ways to improve MapQuest's Geospatial services and grow FlyCleaners' business.

"They continue to push us to make sure this is a partnership," says Eric Small, FlyCleaners' chief technology officer. "They ask us for our ideas to make the service better and it's a level of partnership that we wouldn't get out of another provider."

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