Company Background
Our client is a Fortune 500 company that provides services, including lawn care, pest control, home cleaning, furniture repair and home inspections, to residential and commercial customers through a network of thousands of company-owned locations and franchised licensees.

Challenges and Requirements
Because our customer performs services at various residential and commercial locations, information regarding these sites needs to be given to drivers before they begin their routes each day. Before contacting PKWARE®, the company maintained large maps at each truck station that displayed all stops for each driver; drivers would gather the information they needed and independently run their daily routes.

A recent purchase of handheld devices allows the company to electronically provide route information to its drivers via a wireless network. The use of these devices maximized efficiency, as a central corporate location can add, delete, and update routes as needed. While the addition of these handheld devices helped streamline operations, the company soon encountered problems efficiently moving large amounts of data from their central corporate location to the handheld units.

The Solution – PKZIP® for i5/OS®
Our client found that PKZIP for i5/OS Standard Edition solved the issues they were experiencing with wirelessly moving large quantities of data from the data center to thousands of handheld devices. Due to the wireless transit of information, large packets of data are sent over a small pipe. ZIP compression, using PKZIP for i5/OS, was the solution to the problem. Each day, the data center leverages the software on their AS/400 to compress individual service route data, sending ZIP files to the handheld devices of its thousands of drivers.

When in the field, representatives can also send information back 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 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 has seen immediate positive results from the implementation of PKZIP for i5/OS. The process of sending route information to drivers has been streamlined, eliminating missed calls and allowing for cancellations to reach drivers in enough time for them to react and reorganize routes to maximize the number of service calls made 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.