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Spotlights

Client: International Package Express Carrier
Project: Customer Care Automation

This project development involved a freight company that elected to move away from its older, mainframe-based Customer Care System to a fully distributed Object-Oriented system— designed and built in collaboration with ASIX, using Forté Software. Forté fully supports the distributed N-tier client/server model for enterprise computing, and provides excellent integration with existing mainframe systems that manage and move freight. This new Customer Service system was tested to far beyond its original capacity due to the UPS strike of 1997. The system is in production in 15 call centers serving over 1500 users..

ASIX’s Role:

ASIX was responsible for design, construction, implementation, testing, and debugging of the application. ASIX led most joint application development (JAD) design sessions, and ASIX designers and implementers were responsible for most of the critical aspects of the project. ASIX’s previous experience with Forté and other large-scale Object-Oriented projects allowed us to provide a framework and development life cycle that was a major factor in the success of the project. ASIX played an integral role in this project, including:

Application Benefits:

Speed! The new application identifies the caller through an ANI hit and PBX collected digits to allow the Customer Service Representative (CSR) to reduce verification of a caller down from 30 to 60 seconds to 3 to 6 seconds. A VRU fallout call, which used to take 2 to 3 minutes, has been reduced to between 30 and 40 seconds. Special care customers are identified immediately, before the CSR receives the call. The application allows the CSRs to schedule callbacks, and notifies the CSR when a callback is due.

Methodology:

• Full life-cycle development, implementing OO technologies and Modeling tools
• General RAD methodologies, Use Cases, Event Traces, JAD sessions
• Select Enterprise CASE tool

Technology:

• Oracle 7
• Distributed OO Application
• High Availability with Load Balancing and Fault Tolerance
• Integrated Telephony Services
• Integrated VRU Services
• Large comprehensive Customer Service SystemT
• 300,000 lines of Forté code, which generated 1.6 million lines of C++
• 78 tables in each Oracle instance
• 66 RPC classes
• 109 Business classes & 110 Display classes
• 78 Windows
• 67 Service Objects

Partners:

• Forte Software
• Oracle
• Select Software