Mashaweer is the first personal service company in Egypt. It’s purely dedicated to saving its clients’ time and effort acting as a personal assistant 24 hours a day. The personal assistant is a rider with a motorcycle who runs any errands for individual clients or corporations at any given time. The most common service they provide is buying groceries or other goods from stores, paying bills, and acting as a courier.

Mashaweer’s success relies heavily on their flexibility, and they have often received unusual requests that they have fulfilled in order to gain customer loyalty –

including: going to the gym to tell someone to turn on the phone as someone is trying to reach them, delivering presents to a client’s fiancée every 15 minutes, and carrying a client’s shopping bags from the car to the house.

Mashaweer is an essential service for the Egyptians because traffic is a problem that everyone in Egypt faces, making it difficult for an individual to get a couple of errands done on the same day. Mashaweer’s service has achieved such success in Alexandria and Cairo, where traffic is an issue, saving people one of the most valuable commodities out there; time. The service is able to give people more quality time to spend with family or friends, instead of taking care of the daily errands that usually take up half of one’s day. They also act as a security or safety measure as they perform people’s errands in unsafe times, such as the period after the revolution or simply late at night. Most individuals cannot afford having a full time assistant to perform their errands whenever needed. Mashaweer’s agents act as full time assistants for every individual at a part time cost.

Since starting the company in Alexandria in 2010, Mashaweer has since expanded to Cairo and operates around 600 orders per day. They plan to expand even further geographically within Egypt and to other countries in the region as well as enhancing and increasing the services they provide............

1. What kinds of applications are described in this case? What business functions do they support?
2. What are the benefits from equipping their riders with PDAs?
3. Was it a good decision to expand the business to Cairo? What are the implications of information systems?

4. Do you think that Mashaweer will be able to accomplish their future strategy and sustain its market share?
5. Do you think in near future, the competition between Mashaweer and Wassaly will be aggressive? Why?
Case contributed by Niveen Ezzat, Cairo Un