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Blog Our client is a Fortune 500 company that provides various services to residential and commercial customers through a network of thousands of locations and franchised licenses. Services of the company include lawn care services, pest control, home cleaning, and home inspection.
Our client performs services at various residential and commercial locations. Information pertaining to various service locations needs to be given to drivers before they can begin their route of services each day. Before contacting PKWARE, the company maintained large maps at each truck station that displayed all of the stops for each driver; they would gather the information they needed and independently run their daily routes.
A recent purchase of handheld devices now allows the company to electronically provide route information to its drivers. The use of these handheld devices maximizes efficiency, as a central corporate location can add, delete, and update routes as needed. While the addition of handheld scanning devices was going to help streamline operations, the company soon encountered problems efficiently moving large amounts of data from their central corporate location to the handheld units.
Our client found that PKZIP for i5/OS solved the issues they were experiencing with moving large quantities of data. The data center sends information wirelessly to thousands of drivers who each have a handheld device. Due to the wireless transit of information, a lot of data is being sent over a small pipe – ZIP compression was able to solve the problem. Using PKZIP, the data center leverages the software on their AS/400 to compress the routes and stops for the various drivers. The zip files are sent wirelessly to the drivers who receive them on their handheld devices.
When in the field, various representatives can also send back information to the central data center. For example, one of the company’s franchises has over 800 field representatives that use the handheld devices across a three state region. A representative can gather information at a specific service call location and then send it back to the data center, compressed, where it can be uploaded to the AS/400, decompressed, and logged for future use.
Our client is seeing immediate positive results from implementing PKZIP. The process of sending route information to drivers has been streamlined, eliminating missed calls and allowing for cancellations to reach drivers with enough time to react and reorganize their routes. Ultimately, the use of PKZIP for i5/OS has maximized efficiency by allowing for more stops per day per driver. In addition, increasing the ease and speed with which information can be returned to the central location allows for faster billing, invoicing, and processing; this, combined with a reduction in error, has improved overall business and increased company profits.
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