South African, mid-size software development company, Adroit Technologies, has employed Opus business analysis software in its Johannesburg-based Call Centre, resulting in improvements in turnaround time and other key performance areas, as well as improving the management of the division.
To support the installation of its supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) product and ensure its seamless operation, Adroit runs a support centre of five support engineers from its headquarters, providing technical assistance to approximately 1900 process driven companies which have installed the scada systems.
As production and operations-centric organisations, Adroit's clients face increasing global pressures to maximise their efficiencies and sweat their assets. Additionally, the inherent characteristics of the process industry, such as volume driven production and continuous operation, rely on the smooth, efficient and effective running of their processes and production plants via the scada's monitoring and control functionality. To provide clients with superior customer care, Adroit installed Opus business analysis and reporting software to monitor its support centre performance and other key performance indicators (KPIs).
Adroit's Call Centre manager, Pawel Pietak comments "With the Opus system, calls cannot go missing. Additionally, the entire department has access to all the logged calls to ensure seamless handling and the fact that it is HTML-based means we can access our call records from any location in realtime."
Dave Wibberley, managing director of Adroit Technologies comments on the installation of Opus business analysis and report writing software as a tool for other small, medium and micro enterprises (SMME's), "Cost is always a major factor for any SMME, Opus' affordability puts it within easy reach of any organisation. It is fast, and it automates many of the internal and external reporting functions that we as an SMME simply do not have resources to perform on a regular basis."
The product is also scalable as it can access information from numerous databases or number of databases on the market and can combine this information into pre-configured reports giving users a total overview of the organisation's different divisions and functions.
Adroit Support Centre comprises two departments: Testing and Support, which takes the initial telephone queries, logs them using the VB customised Call Centre programme and provides a solution telephonically or by travelling to the clients site. Support may also refer the call to one of the two other departments, namely Drivers, where the drivers are written that make it possible for other systems to interact with the Adroit scada; or Development, who's staff are responsible for the continual innovation and ongoing development of the Adroit product.
Using the Opus software system, Adroit Support Centre engineers and managers have access to customisable, realtime information comprising every aspect of Support Centre activity. For Adroit's Call Centre these include department reports, personal reports (information per support centre engineer), key performance indicator (KPI) reports per department, monthly KPIs, query and solution reports, support reports, top 10 user reports, support company calls, and top 10 calls unresolved. Each of these reports contains information germane to the Centre's performance and function.
The KPI reports per department for example, is a scheduled report that is automatically e-mailed by the Opus software to the managing director of Adroit each week at a set time and day. It provides current information about complete and incomplete tickets for the month to date. This includes percentages of calls outstanding and complete, the average time it took to complete a call (in days and hours) for each support engineer on the team and also per department. Additionally, this report provides a three-month account of this same data for comparative purposes, and a year-to-date section that is weighed against to the same figures in the previous year.
Opus also contains a light Excel reporting whereby users can perform calculations within a report should they wish to do so. For extended Excel functionality, the reports can be opened in Excel to allow the user the full benefits of Excel for calculations, graphing and so forth. Pietak adds, "Key word search, drag and drop functionality, advanced graphic representations and excellent product support all make Opus extremely user friendly for the SMME."
Reports are also configured in such a way that they contain tiers of information. The support report, for example, provides a list of every call made to the centre since August 2000 with limited information by ticket number of the call, its origin and contact information of the caller, and its status. Through the use of Opus' cutting edge drag-and-drop technology, the information can be arranged within the report to suit the user. This includes sorting the data by company, date of call, support engineer responsible and other variables that have been pre-configured. It automatically generates statistical information such as averages, maximum/minimum values, variances, counts and sums.
For more detail on these records, the Opus report provides a graphical representation of all the incomplete tickets according to the amount of time they have been outstanding. By clicking on a point on the graph, the system provides more detailed information on the exact nature of that call. The same can be done for completed calls, whereby Opus will also provide a detailed account of the solution that was provided.
Automatic generation of reports is not limited to the internal operations of Adroit. Once a call is logged and an e-mail message is sent to the client providing the client with the ticket number and the details of the problem. Each time the support engineer updates information on the system with regards to the logged call and a final e-mail is sent to the client once the log has been completed with details of the solution that was provided. This functionality saves Adroit time and manpower that could be eaten away by performing mundane reporting functions.
Adroit's Call Centre architecture draws its data from a SQL database and its client contact information from MS Outlook. Tony Calafate, software testing engineer for Adroit, designed a Visual Basic scripted Call Centre programme to log data to the SQL database, then to query it using Opus analysis and reporting software. SMMEs with no, or limited IT support and expertise can benefit utilising Opus Knowledge Dynamics, Opus' project management, consulting and database development arm, to implement and configure the Opus software, as well as to design and customise databases to suit each individual client's requirements.
For more information contact Dave Wibberley, MD, Opus Technologies, 011 781 3665, [email protected], www.opusoft.co.za
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