Toshiba America Business Solutions (TABS), one of the world's leading manufacturers and suppliers of electronic office equipment, has commenced its North America coast-to-coast roll-out of Tesseract's browser-based Service Center service management system eventually involving a total of 1,478 users throughout the United States.

The massive implementation programme will create a uniform platform for improved customer support from the dealer network supplying and servicing Toshiba copiers, faxes and printers, while also giving TABS management increased visibility and, therefore, control of all inventory, service and contracts information.

Tesseract's Service Center is scheduled to be implemented at 22 dealer sites and will involve 378 users as well as 1,100 field technicians, who will be able to communicate with their host systems via the software's Remote Engineer Access functionality.

Service Center's step-by-step implementation programme has seen Toshiba dealers in Colorado and Kentucky go live with the system and the software is now scheduled to be implemented at three more sites this year.

TABS's dealer channel currently numbers 14 companies with 86 branches throughout the US. The plan is to extend that to 22 dealers within two years and, according to Denise O'Donnell, director of application development at TABS, Tesseract's Service Center software is key to the operations continued success.

"Service Center will not only provide more effective call allocation and distribution and improve the management of spares (parts request), but it will also improve the efficiency of invoicing," she says.

"In addition, from an overall business perspective we will have one common platform for all our dealers. This will make it so much easier for us to incorporate new acquisitions while also leveraging corporate IT support and operational resources."

The TABS business is based on an end-to-end Oracle database and because the company's IT objective is a fully integrated system versus best-of-breed, it was a diversion from the TABS plan to interface a product such as Tesseract.

"Tesseract's Service Center was chosen because of its ability to effectively manage meter business and integrate seamlessly with our Oracle accounts," adds Denise O'Donnell.
Due to Service Center's underlying browser-based technology, TABS is using a third party
to host its entire Oracle-Tesseract IT infrastructure, and is thus gaining 24x7 availability in the bargain.

The system's browser-based capabilities are highlighted by TABS as having particular benefits, and the intention is for the field engineers to make full use of this functionality via PDAs, laptops or WAP devices, depending on regional communication coverage.

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