Case Studies

A+ Strategy

The Challenge:

In 1991, AAA wanted to create a state-of-the-art emergency road service system incorporating Geographical Information System (GIS) data and tracking of call and vendor performance. In addition, the system needed to provide optimal routing for service vehicles, graphical display maps for directions for dispatcher, in-vehicle terminals for dispatching, and status updates for customer service tracking. By moving its services to an electronic platform, AAA wanted to improve service response times, minimize human intervention for the dispatch of service, decrease radio utilization, provide better management tools, monitor the status of service calls in real time. Many of technologies applied to this system had never been utilized in the fashion applied to this system.

The Solution:

AAA provides a singular service. As a first step, we carefully examined AAA's procedures and structure, and what they expected from an automated system. We developed a technology solution that not only addressed but went beyond these goals, creating a solution that was stable for the present and foreseeable future and would be highly adaptable and scalable in the unforeseeable future. Due to AAA's uniqueness, the majority of the system was custom-written for them. Something AAA's experts had not anticipated was scalability; networks used by the different local AAA offices varied widely in size. We designed the system to be fully scalable simply by changing the underlying database. This required no coding changes in the application. Platforms involved included AIX/RS6000, Windows, Informix, SQL, and Oracle. Programming was in Visual Basic and C++. Developing and implementing the program took approximately eight months.

The Results:

AAA saw benefits almost immediately after implementing our solution. Customers were much more satisfied with AAA's service, as well as their greater ability to pinpoint problems real-time and react to them. AAA lowered expenses and increased efficiency, eliminated a radio frequency, and saw decreased stress in its employees due to the more efficient system, which resulted in lower employee turnover. AAA's new system gained them national and international attention. And Innovate helped them get there.

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