Editor’s note: This article was originally published by Google on The Keyword here and is written by DoorDash, the door-to-door food delivery company 

At DoorDash, we’re focused on giving our merchants, including restaurants and retailers, the tools and resources to reach more customers. As part of that, we now provide them with custom Android tablets to accept orders and communicate directly with customers — complete with secure and easy-to-manage features from Android Enterprise.

The challenge: Need for durable and scalable device solutions

Due to supply chain shortages during the pandemic, we couldn’t provide merchants with a steady supply of enterprise tablets. The interim consumer-grade tablets we used couldn’t stand up to the high humidity and spills common in kitchen environments, which resulted in frequent repairs or replacements.

We also needed to manually enroll those consumer-grade tablets before shipping them to merchants, requiring hundreds of hours of engineering resources to validate and certify multiple SKUs. And we had to manage many different device models for each country and carrier, including non-Google-certified tablets that were difficult to enroll. Supporting multiple SKUs was a true IT headache. We needed enterprise-grade devices that were rugged, durable and easy to manage at scale.

The solution: Tablets secured and managed with Android Enterprise

To help us improve the DoorDash merchant experience and device manageability, we turned to enterprise mobility experts Social Mobile. Social Mobile customized an Android tablet for DoorDash, with features like a rugged case and moisture-proof coating on its circuit boards, built on top of Android Enterprise’s API for security and scalability.

With Android Enterprise, we can deploy our tablets with zero-touch enrollment.¹ This method is faster and more secure, since each device is configured the same way with policies and settings pre-loaded. The tablets arrive ready-to-use with DoorDash-branded packaging and inserts. Merchants just turn on the device, connect to the network and can start accepting orders in a matter of minutes.

With Social Mobile’s Enterprise Mobility platform, once an Android security update is released, all devices are updated from one portal within minutes. Automatic updates with Android Enterprise also give us peace of mind.

We added another layer of security to the DoorDash Merchant tablet with Google Play Protect. By creating a single product SKU that’s Google Play Protect-certified and certified with all regulators, we’ve saved millions of dollars per year in engineering and project management resources. This has also streamlined the onboarding process and made it easier to launch in new markets, since we no longer have to source or certify new devices.

Android tablets help our merchants spend less time troubleshooting technology and more time focusing on their business. Plus, our IT team can rest assured that the devices are secure and easily deployed. These are the kinds of results we were hoping for, and Social Mobile and Android Enterprise helped us deliver on them.