For the past 100 years, the Customer has grown to become a major importer, roaster, and distributor of premium coffees and teas throughout the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. They also provide vending machines across their customer locations, supported by a strong work force of 220+ field service engineers. Like most companies with large field service teams, the Customer sought to raise productivity and reduce their Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). Since managers could not easily observe the field service employees’ work, it was challenging to schedule field technicians in an efficient manner. In addition, the scheduling process did not accommodate changes and cancellations in services calls. The Customer realized the need to automate field service processes and provide timely data to managers for better visibility and management. With access to real-time data, managers could make better decisions about deploying field service teams.

The field service engineers refill or service the coffee vending machines upon customer requests. In order to improve customer service levels and to improve the productivity of field service engineers, the Customer needed an application that would make it easy for the field engineers to receive service requests and communicate their status on the move. This application needed to integrate with the Customer’s existing SAP system and include centralized administration of devices and reporting of the data captured. These requirements presented the challenge of identifying the carrier network, the mobile device(s), and the application development platform that best met their current and future needs. AgreeYa implemented a Service Management Application (SMA), certified by AT&T, that was deployed on the service team’s mobile devices. The RIM Blackberry and Motorola V365 were identified as the best device platforms. The AT&T APN solution provided a robust connectivity and infrastructure platform for the application. AgreeYa leveraged its O³ (onsite-offsite-offshore) delivery model with offshore Global Delivery Center (GDC) in India, to complete the project quickly and reduce the total cost of ownership for the Customer.

Some of the highlights of this project were:

• Requirements study, user interviews, training, and roll-out were completed onsite.
• Design, development, and testing were completed offshore.
• Constant communication and coordination between the onsite and offshore teams ensured quick response and resolution to issues during user acceptance testing, training, and implementation.
• AgreeYa’s information technology lab (iLab) was used for application testing and quality assurance.
• Over the Air Deployment (OTA) was used to deploy the application across 220 handheld devices.
• The centralized server was integrated with the SAP backend system and mobile devices.

The benefits realized by the Customer as a result of this project include:

• Increased service engineer productivity
• Decreased response time to service requests and reduced Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
• Increased overall coverage of service requests by using the AT&T network
• Reduced costs by reducing voice calls and eliminating paper-based work order processing
• Centralized web-based administration and reporting for easy reporting and trending
• Low Total Cost of Ownership resulting from AgreeYa’s O³ delivery model

J2ME Framework, JBoss application server 4.0, MIDP 2.0, CLDC 1.1, BlackBerry Java Development Environment 4.1.0 (JDE) on BlackBerry, Motorola V365, and other similar devices.