Econz to build dispatch system for Australia's NRMA

12.30pm - by ADAM GIFFORD

Wireless data specialist Econz has won a contract to build a dispatch system for New South Wales automobile association NRMA Motoring and Services worth more than $6 million over five years.

Eight additional staff will be hired in Auckland to help build and maintain the system, which is due to be fully rolled out by next October.

Econz chief executive Michael Hartley said the basis of the Computer Aided Dispatch System (CADS) is the application built for the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland in 1999, which was also sold to the New Zealand Automobile Association.

NRMA Motoring and Services has more than 2 million members and responds to up to 12,000 calls a day across New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.

The system includes optimisers which will tell dispatchers which of the NMRA's 550 vehicles can respond quickest to an incident.

The system offers dispatchers three ways of working: decision replacement, where calls are automatically dispatched with no manual intervention; decision support, where the software offers a recommendation which is validated by a dispatcher; and fully manual control.

The core software is run on an Oracle database on three Hewlett Packard HP-UX servers at three separate locations for full hot redundancy, so if two of the servers are knocked out by technical failure or natural disaster the system will keep running.

Hartley said the association is investing in 550 tablet PCs which will be carried in the roadside assistance vehicles.

"That means we will be able to do things like send dispatch maps out to the vehicles," he said.

Because the 2.5G wireless networks do not reliably cover all of the state, Econz is using a trunk radio network to move data around.

Hartley said the Econz system is also being considered by the Western Australia and South Australia automobile associations, and it is also talking with associations in South Africa and the United States.

Econz