Pitney Bowes Canada is the country's largest reseller and service provider for office equipment, including multifunction devices, color printers, copiers and fax machines -- as well as everything from document management services to mailing systems.
"It's everything from content creation through content delivery, start to finish," says Ake Deutschmann, Pitney Bowes Canada's director of information technology.
About 800 of the company's employees are supplied with BlackBerry devices, including operations, sales and service teams, at all levels from field service technicians to managers. The devices themselves, Deutschmann says, range from the BlackBerry 8700 to the new Bold 9700.
Pitney Bowes Canada's main BlackBerry app was designed for its field service technicians by Antenna Software -- it's a replacement, Deutschmann says, for a previous solution that was much, much more cumbersome. "The [techs] had an emulator running on a Pocket PC that was linked via Bluetooth to a cell phone, and then they had to scroll around on the little screen and try to find information," he says.
The Antenna Software app offers greater ease of use as well as increased functionality. "Whereas they used to have to log into this emulator and scroll through the open service calls to find what was next for them, now the calls get pushed out to them -- the ones that are in their territory -- and they can decide which ones they want to take next... and then we can track their travel time, how much time they spent onsite, any parts that were consumed on the service call and similar information," Deutschmann says.
One significant benefit of the app, Deutschmann says, was a 15 percent increase in the service techs' productivity. "The ROI was under 18 months," he says.
The solution also connects to a Web-based customer service interface. "Before we implemented it, we developed some new Web functionality for our customers so they can go to our Web site, log into their account, pick the machine they're having an issue with -- and it creates a service call in the mainframe that then automatically gets dispatched to the service technician," Deustchmann says. "So it reduces the number of calls coming into the call center."
Deutschmann says the initial deployment of the solution took some time. "Whenever you introduce a new application to a workforce that's been used to doing things a certain way for a long time, you've got to carefully plan the change management piece," he says. "It's critical to get the business involved up front to define what the future process is going to look like, and then also get them involved in the training and the support mechanisms -- so we had a support line open for the first month where people could call in with any issues to get them resolved quickly while we worked out any kinks."
While some technicians resisted the change at first, Deutschmann says, they soon understood the benefits of the new solution. "It gave people some time back that they didn't have before, because they could actually enter the service call information while they were in the field on the call, as opposed to writing it down and then entering it later in the day," he says.
And the field service app isn't the company's only BlackBerry application -- Pitney Bowes Canada is also currently in the process of deploying a mobile Salesforce.com app for its strategic sales group.
"We're deploying just the laptop client right now to give them a chance to get used to it -- but once they've done that, then we'll roll it out on the BlackBerry, and they'll have the Salesforce.com interface with all the reporting and client information and so on," Deutschmann says.
Previously, Deustchmann says, the sales group was limited to laptop connectivity. "That's not the most convenient when you're on the road, so they had to be more proactive the day before," he says. "They'd have to plan their calls for the day, go in and print off all the required information, and then take it with them."
"This way, they'll be able to grab it on the road as they need it," he says.
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