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Ikon Office Solutions' AP4D Dispatch System
| Description |
| IKON Office Solutions is
one the country's largest copier service and sales organization.
Their clients purchase or lease copiers and office equipment ranging
from small office copiers to million dollar duplicating equipment.
IKON has a huge service technician force and uses dispatchers to
dispatch technicians to various sites for installation, service and
repair issues.
IKON's dispatchers are responsible
for taking calls from customers, entering the call into their
business system, finding an available technician, paging the
technician and relaying the information about the call to the
technician. This was done using a combination of numeric pagers,
voice mail boxes and phone tag. All this took a great deal of time
and took the dispatcher away from their number one task, which was
to answer customer calls.
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| Project |
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The AP4D system was
integrated into IKON's existing UNIX based business systems,
allowing dispatchers to use their existing application to enter,
track and dispatch service calls. The AP4D system automatically
dispatched newly created and changed trouble tickets to the intended
service technicians by alphanumeric pagers. The technicians then had
all the necessary information on their pager for the trouble call,
removing the need for them to call the dispatcher. It was estimated
by one IKON branch that the system saved them about 30% off of their
dispatch budget, and was fully paid back with three months.
The product went
through 3 phases of evolution and was used nationwide by over 40
IKON branches to dispatch to over 4,000 service technicians,
generating upwards of 100,000 pages / messages per day.
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| Technologies |
OS/2 Warp, Windows NT
Server, UNIX, Motorola Air Apparent, Borland C++ for OS/2, C, Sybase
SQL Anywhere, Visual C++, Visual Basic, Modem / Asynchronous I/O,
TCP/IP Sockets and Paging.
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