July/Aug 2004

Having experienced productivity gains equivalent to one extra job per technical representative per week since it introduced Transcomm's dedicated mobile data network into its business five years ago, Coors Brewers has extended the contract for a further two years.

Coors Brewers supplies and services equipment in over 45,000 licensed premises, and the company receives 250,000 service calls a year in the UK. The resultant high volume of data, coupled with the need to send information out quickly to over 200 field-based technical representatives, was a key consideration in the company's original decision to select Transcomm's network, which uses Mobitex packet-switching technology for data communications.

Three X Communications provides the link between each field representative's laptop, PDA and Coors Brewers' Geac service management system.

Tim Stokes, CTS Systems Development Manager for Coors Brewers, says: "We operate in an extremely competitive environment where we needed the 'best of breed' technologies provided by Transcomm and Three X Communications in order to maintain our market lead."

 

He adds: "Transcomm has exceeded our expectations. It has enabled us to respond more quickly to customer calls, and our service centre staff are now more proactive because they have a much clearer idea of what is happening in the field."

Stokes explains that previously staff used pagers and an interactive voice response system to communicate with workers in the field. The calls were then logged and details were paged to the field. All other requests and details were handled by phone.

"This was expensive in call costs as well as slow and inefficient, because job information was not collected until the end of the day. Now it is quicker and far more accurate, delivering much better service to our customers."