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“It now takes Konica Minolta only 90 seconds to detect and precisely define a fault or potential fault from the time it occurs, and take action,” he says. “For our customers it means we usually know about a problem before they do. It’s also increased the sophistication of our preventative maintenance programmes, which for customers means fewer service disruptions. In the case of a component failure for example, we detect it within seconds and can often get to that site and replace the component before there is any adverse affect on the customer. The first the customer knows of a problem is when our technician arrives to attend to a machine the customer thinks is working perfectly.”
The other piece of the winning solution is PDA-based. Konica Minolta commissioned Cosyn to write software that enables Konica Minolta technicians on customer service calls to "talk" directly to the IBM server platform back in the home office using PDA devices with cellular modems.
The technicians use their PDAs to log and track their work. The solution manages service calls and inventory, acknowledges job status, and ensures billing accuracy.
When a technician accepts a job from an automatic alert, he states what time he will attend the customer site. This enables customers to receive accurate advice on what time a technician will attend, and drives automatic escalation if that time schedule is exceeded.
When a job is completed, technicians scan a bar code on each component they use. This sends a message back to the home office servers, which causes that component to be automatically replenished overnight. It ensures technicians arrive at a customer site with a full complement of spare parts, so customers don’t have to wait for parts.
Tony Day says Konica Minolta looked in Australia, the U.S and the U.K to try to find a company selling or using a solution that was similar to what Konica Minolta had in mind.
“We couldn’t find anyone to get experience from, either out-of-the-box or custom built,” he says, “so we set about building what we wanted.”
Cosyn Software CEO Trevor Middleton says the company wove together four of its shrinkwrapped products – spanning auditing, alerts, and anomaly and profitability tracking - to produce a solution that was ‘streets ahead’ of anything he has seen in the U.S. “We derive around 50% of our revenue from exports, so we have a good sense of how the New Zealand market differs from offshore markets,” he says.
“One of the things that strikes us about the New Zealand market is that it’s very light on its feet. It’s a major advantage to be operating in a market compact enough to build and implement truly innovative projects like this one. At the awards ceremony in Chicago I was speaking to Volvo – they have 220,000 users. A company that size has to wait until the technology is proven in every particular. They can’t seize the competitive advantage that belongs to the first mover in the way Konica Minolta has. Thanks to the work that we’ve done with Konica Minolta we can now prove that this solution would indeed scale up to a Volvo-sized company – and that’s the message we’re taking to the international market. “
Trevor Middleton says it’s still very rare to connect hardware to intelligent software in the way Konica Minolta has. “The company’s use of digital copiers was an enabler of the technology behind the solution, that was one element. The second critical element was that Konica Minolta had a clear and compelling customer service vision that drove the project. So many times you see technology ‘looking for a home’ – but the most successful projects almost always have a clear business vision driving development of the technology.” |