1. Suppose you have conceived the idea of OTISLINE.

What would be your arguments to convince the management for investing in this project? Implementing OTISLINE would offer the following immediate advantages to the firm: Strategic Importance: OTISLINE helps improve the post-sale services. Post-sales service is of strategic importance to the firm due to its steady demand & high profitability. Responsiveness:Industry data says that an elevator service company is usually selected by a customer on the basis of responsiveness (most important), quality & price.Responsiveness to customer callback requests has been greatly enhanced due to OTISLINE (response time reduced to less than a second). Backed by OTISLINE, the company began to offer a guaranteed response time to special customers such as hospitals & buildings with only one elevator.Further, reducing callbacks for each installed elevator by one year would save Otis 5 million USD annually. Communication: OTISLINE provided top management with quality, substantial& timely information on the quality of service rendered to their customers. With OTISLINE, the SMS (Service Management System) was expanded to include all maintenance activity for elevators under a service contract& the service and engineering managers had the necessary information they needed to continue to boost the quality & reliability of Otis products. Operational Efficiency:OTISLINEenabled the firm to measure dispatcher performance against department standards & averages, improve dispatcher efficiency & hence helped in estimating staff requirement. Customer Satisfaction: Customer Satisfaction, as measured by a reduction in both the volume of complaints & service calls, improved as a result of implementation of OTISLINE. Impact onBusiness Development: Supported elevator sales by making data about competitive losses & performance of new equipment sales representatives easily accessible to top management.
Potential Applications in the Future:

Integration with REM: OTISLINE could be integrated with REM that would enable an elevator to directly communicate with a central computer that would determine the cause of the problems, transmit a message to the OTISLINE system and dispatch a service mechanic. Handling Emergency Calls: OTISLINE recognized calls from In-car phones and moved such emergency calls to the head of the queuethus reducing the waiting time. Increasing Operational Efficiency by replacing Service Mechanic Pagers with Hand-Held Terminals Better Contract Management & Telemarketing of Services

2. How was the implementation planned? Would you like to suggest some changes in the plan of implementation? Before the existence of OTISLINE, the management came to know of the service problems only if there was a customer complaint. OTISLINE helped the company to produce excess callback reports for different levels of management. The successful implementation of OTISLINE was planned in two parts: Developing the Information Services through the expansion of Service Management System(SMS): The SMS database management system, which only had the customer master file information, was upgraded with the help of OTISLINE. The SMS was expanded to include allmaintenance activity for elevators under a service contract. The OTISLINE application was allowed the OTISLINE dispatcher to respond to a customer in under a second. Sub second response time was an important parameter because more than 2% of the transactions were having more than a 5 second response time, which was very high. The most important aspect of implementing OTISLINE in information services was that a large portion of the information services budget was allotted for its support to adopt OTISLINEs strict response -time and performance needs. Developing Customer Service by hiring and training skilled dispatchers: OTISLINE hired highly skilled dispatchers as evident from half of them having college degrees, and many of them speaking two languages. New hires also had to undergo 4-6 weeks of in-house training on the OTISLINE software, operation of the phone system, customer satisfaction skills, terminology and possible

system problems. There were regular seminars and standardized evaluation methodologies like the dispatcher evaluation forms to assess the dispatchers. Suggestions: Improve callback request efficiency: During one callback request, four OTISLINE were usually involved 4 dispatchers (log a request, page the service mechanic, receive the call from the service mechanic, log the resolution from the closing call). This could have been further automated investing in technology that would automatically send a page to the service mechanic once a request had been logged in. Similarly, allowing for a page from the service mechanic which involved only closing the call to be automatically updated in the system as closed. Standardization of options on toll-free customer care numbers through Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Rather than having each customer getting a response from an agent, a standard IVR could be implemented where the most common problems and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) from the customers would be automatically given a system-stored answer which would then be logged into the database. This would be a good cost saving measure. 3) What would be the impact of the systems, if any on Otis? Information system has vital impact on the how sales, service and inventory maintenance was done in Otis . Every aspect is explained below: The use of informational systems has helped Otis attain reduction in cost and as well improve service. This has helped Otis to develop a centralised customer service system called Otisline. Deployment of Otisline has helped to improve the callback time of their service so Otis can improve on Customer Satisfaction by bringing about this customer oriented approach. Hence can improve customer loyalty and raise the profitability. With the huge level of data Otis is able to assimilate this when properly analysed can present an opportunity to clearly track reports about repairs that has happened in various buildings across various geographic locations. The huge volume of data can be used by senior management to analyse various aspects to on how to effectively compete with low price service providers. Otisline facilitates the offering contract to its customers. The NES-New Equipment Sales system was developed and could use Otisline to automate production status, this system also supported sales reps to organise data, estimate cost, configure new products and record outcomes of the negotiations. This system also made data about competitive losses and performance of new sale. The manufacturing division of Otis, all relevant details pertaining to orders can be transmitted to the plant can very well optimise their raw material inventory. Data about past sale can be used to devise a sales forecast and help in the process of informal decision making for the senior management.