Kinetics cracks data hold-ups

By PAUL BRISLEN

When software developer Kinetics had trouble tracking its own engineers it discovered something it wasn't weren't expecting: how to be a customer.

Kinetics managing director Andrew Hunt said the Auckland company decided to build a technical solution to the problem of issuing jobs to engineers out on the road.

"We issue the jobs from our call centre to the job controller and then to the engineers themselves. Often they'd need to ring in to the centre to get more detail or what-have-you and tie up a line."

Hunt said the engineers would also turn up to jobs to discover they hadn't got all the information sent out by the customer and would have to ask the same questions again to find out what was going on.

So Kinetics set out to automate the information flow. After all, it's what the company does for its own customers, so why not do it for itself.

In the process, it discovered it was solving a problem many companies face: how to get information to staff in the field.

"There were plenty of off-the-shelf systems designed for sales-force automation, but nothing that seemed to fit the bill for technicians or engineers."

Kinetics worked with a group doing project work for Auckland University's computer science course and delivered a system that works on the handheld PCs the company uses.

"We wanted something that would reduce double handling of information, be able to deliver accurate information to the field and receive information like job sheets from staff."

The system had to be secure and as easy to use as paper. It also had to be able to send and receive data over a number of different connection media.

"It's able to be used on WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM or GPRS."

Hunt said some staff were comfortable with one smart phone device and others, like himself, with two separate devices, and he didn't want to dictate which would be used.

Hunt uses a Hewlett-Packard iPaq 4700 and HP itself was so impressed it is working with Hunt and Kinetics to sell the solution to other customers.

"It's not what we set out to do - we thought long and hard about giving away what could be a competitive advantage. But ... we realised this is a solution that is itself marketable."