2009 Wireless Leadership Award Winners

Administrative Office of the US Courts

Project: Federal probation and pretrial services officers manage their case loads and keep required records using a case management application called PACTS, or the Probation and Pretrial Services Automated Case Tracking System. Recently, the Administrative Office of the US Courts developed a mobile version of PACTS called PACTS Mobile. Using their BlackBerry® smartphones and the PACTS Mobile application, nearly 5,000 officers in the federal judiciary can now access offender's contact information, images, and record of activities. Several additional web applications designed specifically for the BlackBerry smartphones provide nationwide directory services for all federal judiciary employees and look-up capability for over 2,000,000 offender records.

Impact: Created collaboratively by a team of federal judiciary technologists in Atlanta, San Antonio, and Washington; PACTS Mobile has been a cost-effective and innovative means of leveraging the BlackBerry solution in law enforcement. Mobile field officers are no longer required to carry paper case notes which has resulted in greater efficiency. With the PACTS Mobile wireless sync feature, officers have the most up-to-date records on their mobile devices. Officer safety is improved since they are always informed of a client's most current status. PACTS Mobile has made federal probation and pretrial services officers more effective and efficient.

The City of Vaughan

Partner Solution: Freeance Mobile

Project: As a large and fast-growing city in Ontario, Canada, the City of Vaughan is technologically advanced in the way it delivers services. Using the BlackBerry solution, the City built two applications for their Enforcement Services officers. These officers use their BlackBerry smartphones to look up and report on license infractions by businesses and individual operators, such as taxi drivers. To leverage the Corporate GIS, the City is actively developing smartphone applications incorporating the Freeance Mobile solution, which supports location mapping on the BlackBerry smartphone. This will enable the City to actively manage cases in the field.

Impact: Using these applications has made the Enforcement Services officers more effective. They issued 55% more notices of by-law non-compliance in a 12 month period, and have freed up almost two hours a day that used to be spent on the phone with the City Clerk's Office. The City estimates that they have saved almost $30,000 in 12 months in reduced processing time and improved efficiencies. And the community receives better value for their tax dollars through Enforcement officers being able to more quickly address such issues.

Instituto Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM)

Project: Instituto Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) used the BlackBerry solution to build their own mobile learning solution integrated to their educational technology strategies and then gave 4,400 students BlackBerry smartphones. Using the smartphones, students collaborate outside of class on content such as audio, video, PowerPoint and articles. In classrooms they use their BlackBerry smartphone as a tool for learning activities such as peer-to-peer assessments, quick test, and using the voice and images recording applications. Professors develop, publish and push out the content themselves to both enhance the students' self-learning abilities and teach them to use a technology that's popular in the business world.

Impact: More than 80% of the students think this augmented approach to education encourages them to learn more on their own time and access more in-depth educational content. The solution has increased the professional skills of the students, with 90% of them agreeing it promotes communication and 77% of them saying it encourages team work. The professors find it easy to use the technology and are coming up with new ideas for sharing information, to support the curriculum. One of the outcomes of Mobile learning project was the creation of the "Innovation @ Research Center on Educational Technology" to manage and support Mobile Learning as well as state of the art educational technologies.

Northern Doctors Urgent Care

Partner Solution: Astute Mobile Data Solutions

Project: Northern Doctors Urgent Care gave physicians *mCare, an application custom built by Astute Mobile Data Solutions, which allows them to access and update patient records from their BlackBerry smartphones. For any doctor this would be valuable, but more so for these physicians who provide out-of-hours care, or make house calls, to a million patients distributed across the north of England.

Impact: Northern Doctors Urgent Care has a secure method of accessing patient records that meets the UK's stringent patient records and confidentiality requirements. Doctors now enter records into the BlackBerry smartphone, which saves almost an hour of record updating per doctor per shift - or an hourly rate of $200 (£100) per doctor per hour. When they visit their patients, they are prepared to treat the illness, instead of juggling paperwork that may not be up-to-date.

HSBC

Project: HSBC truly relies on its worldwide BlackBerry smartphone deployment - it adds more than 2,000 devices every month to the 43,000 devices it currently has deployed across 65 countries. The company's IT division developed the Bramble system, a suite of solutions for globally managing, configuring, tracking and deploying the BlackBerry smartphones, and 65+ applications their teams rely on, cost-effectively and on a global scale.

Impact: The Bramble system has harnessed the management of the company's global BlackBerry deployment with significant productivity results, including: 85% of the 2,000 monthly Help Desk calls are now fixed at the first line of support; new devices are now provisioned and shipped worldwide within two to three days instead of the eight weeks needed previously; Bramble has a monitoring module used by operations personnel to monitor the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server estate to respond to outages before end users notice a problem; IT personnel can now automatically failover their servers in less than five minutes versus the four hours it used to take.

HSBC recognizes the following internal contributors to their solution…
John Van der Stighelen
Mobility Solutions Chief Systems Manager
Programme Manager for Bramble

Andrew L Brown
Mobility Development Manger
Lead Development and Analysis for Bramble

Ami Dhillon
Manager of Mobility Solutions US
North American Implementation Manager

Nationwide

Partner Solution: TeleNav Track

Project: Claims agents needed a way to access customer data from the field and to streamline the claims process. Nationwide partnered with TeleNav to create an innovative mobile solution for its dispatchers to send customer visit information to their agents' BlackBerry smartphones. Using TeleNav Track, agents can locate customers with voice-driven GPS and turn-by-turn navigation. Agents also can update the results of the customer visit in the same mobile application, which generates reports business leaders can use to improve the competitiveness of the business.

Impact: By giving claims agents a mobile office enabled with GPS capabilities, Nationwide is helping them to maximize their time on the road. They are getting lost less often, which helps reduce fuel costs. The GPS features are especially helpful in getting them to a destination when street signs may no longer be there after hurricane damage or other disasters. By sending claims information and having data captured onsite, including pictures of damage; the company is offering its customers a faster, more efficient way of paying claims.

Safelite AutoGlass

Partner Solution: Dexterra™

Project: 3,600 Safelite AutoGlass repair technicians used to deal with lots of paper, long waits on the phone and frustration when they did onsite windshield repairs. With an innovative approach to thinking and their new Mobile Resource Management solution, which uses the Dexterra platform, they receive customer appointments on their BlackBerry smartphones. They've been even more creative and used Bluetooth technology paired with the BlackBerry smartphone to help them capture customer signatures with an ExpeData digital pen and paper, as well as swipe credit cards and print customer receipts from an O'Neil wireless printer - all on-the-spot.

Impact: Safelite AutoGlass has reduced paper costs by 80% or millions of sheets of paper every year. Technicians are processing payment in front of the customer within 30 seconds versus the five to 10 minutes it takes over the phone. That's resulted in a 23% increase in same day invoicing for completed jobs. Mobile Resource Manager is a clear winner for this auto glass repair leader, simplifying the entire service call, cutting down wasted time and improving customer service and communication.

Ricoh Americas Corporation

Partner Solution: Mirifex Mobile Framework

Project: What happens when you retire a phone-based dispatch system and adopt BlackBerry smartphones so your repair technicians can control their own service calls? Ricoh's innovative application on the Mirifex Mobile Framework shows everything, from completing work orders to ordering parts, can be completed right from the BlackBerry smartphone and have a major impact on business.

Impact: Ricoh estimates they've cut down on 15,000 phone calls per month between their dispatchers and their 2,000 repair technicians. Technicians now check parts inventory, plus order and ship materials to a customer's location from their BlackBerry smartphone, closing out jobs faster. Ricoh believes the results are the equivalent of adding an additional technician per district. Parts information, by its breakdown rate, is collected by the application and shared with Ricoh's head office in Japan to help improve manufacturing processes. Ricoh now regularly meets and exceeds its Service Level Agreements, distinguishing itself as a customer service leader in the office equipment field.

Standard Life

Partner Solution: PaperIQ, Impatica, GPXS Services

Project: Standard Life mobilized the company's collaborative tools for 1400 of its BlackBerry smartphone users, enabling worldwide collaboration benefits for these staff. This was delivered using an innovative combination of solutions from IBM Lotus® Domino® and various RIM Business partners. The vision of providing a toolkit of services which the BlackBerry users can call upon to enhance their productivity, has seen Standard Life developing In-house applications extending Lotus Domino capabilities, such as shared Team Rooms and databases, contact lists and encrypted messaging to BlackBerry smartphones in the hands of busy employees who need to collaborate. The toolkit also provides Impatica to allow staff to project PowerPoint slides, GPXS to print large format documents from any fax machine and PaperIQ to allow digital captures of written text using digital pens. They can also access salesforce.com and Bloomberg.com from their BlackBerry smartphones and PaperIQ from DevelopIQ to allow digital captures.

Impact: Standard Life has given employees an unprecedented ability to work remotely, flexibly and productively. Critical deadlines are met more easily, the digital pen saves most of its users considerable time in not having to transcribe written text. The company has reduced the number of laptops it needs and as well as reducing future demand. Employees now have access to the tools they need on the light, easy-to-use BlackBerry smartphone.

KLA-Tencor

Partner Solution: BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System

Project: For this multi-billion dollar semi-conductor company that operates in 22 countries, telecom charges for cellular phone calls were dramatically expensive. KLA-Tencor turned to a unified messaging solution for BlackBerry smartphones that had the added advantage of leveraging the cost saving features of their corporate PBX and VoIP capabilities.

Impact: Through unified messaging and the BlackBerry Mobile Voice System, KLA-Tencor hoped to reduce cellular costs by 10%. To their surprise, they are already saving almost 20%, a reduction in costs from $250 to $200 per employee. With single number phone capabilities, customers are now receiving calls only from the company's corporate numbers, even though employees may be calling from their BlackBerry smartphones or other desktop phones.