Don't let having a mobile workforce break down your communications. As Stephen Withers finds, some organisations, through the use of wireless integration, have increased their lines of contact, and not just out in the field.
Just as there are several ways of integrating disparate applications, there are also various wireless technologies that can be used to deliver IT services to mobile workers whether they walk around a warehouse, drive around a metropolis, or travel throughout country areas.
T&B; examines four cases where organisations have realised synergies from the combination of wireless and integration.
NCR customises its berries
Around 200 of customer services and corporate finance organisation NCR's field engineers in Australia and New Zealand are equipped with BlackBerries, but they don't use them for e-mail. Custom software, created by NCR in the US instead, hooks the tiny mobile devices into the company's dispatch system.
Kris Levickis, business operations manager for NCR South Pacific area, says the engineers, who service ATMs, retail equipment, and other hardware, can receive instructions and record their progress through the BlackBerries. Whenever one of them reads a message, the BlackBerry automatically generates an acknowledgement. A series of templates minimise the effort required by the engineer to send messages such as advising an ETA onsite or setting some other status for the call (such as "arrived at ATM, but security guard did not attend"). "It's about keeping our customers updated in real time," Levickis says.
Another benefit for the company is that it saves engineers phoning the call centre to update their status, as the dispatch system also taps into the data warehouse. This in turn frees up dispatchers, allowing them more time to produce call lists that will reduce travelling time. Similarly, the information is available for the internal reporting system, which (among other things) monitors compliance with service level agreements (SLAs). For example, managers can be paged to ensure the required action is taken within the contracted response time.
The information logged by the engineers traverses a direct link between Vodafone -- the company's global mobile supplier -- and NCR, and feeds a Teradata data warehouse. (Teradata is a division of NCR.) "The Teradata system is our main repository," says Levickis. "It's the central hub of NCR." From there, the field service data is accessed by various applications in addition to the dispatch system.
One example is "NCR @ Your Service", a Web-based front-end that provides small to medium-sized customers with self-service access to NCR'S support services, including information about their service calls. Large customers can get a direct link to the corresponding data, allowing them to integrate it with their own systems.
NCR is testing an upgrade to the system that adds parts ordering. Orders are routed to the logistics group from the data warehouse, and a picking note is produced at the most appropriate local or interstate warehouse. This process will halve the human intervention needed to order parts, Levickis says. Logistics then updates the service call record with the part's expected delivery time, allowing the engineer to then update his ETA onsite accordingly. Engineers will normally collect parts from the warehouse, but in urgent situations they may be delivered directly to the customer site.
More than 85 percent of service calls are currently updated via BlackBerry, Levickis says. At present, the e-mail and calendar functions are disabled, pending thorough testing to ensure they do not affect the custom software. Levickis says NCR will deploy this BlackBerry-based system around the world.
