Aim:
An Customer Support application needs to run over the Company Intranet and the application itself based on Web based application.

1 The proposed system needs to have a comprehensive facility to define Principals, Product Categories and then classify specific Products under them. Each Product is a unique item that is supplied by a specific Principal. The important considerations here is the Product Codification format which can be recommended by the Solution Provider. Each Product stores details on Buying Price (which is the price at which the product is bought from the Principal) and the Recommended Selling Price (the rate at which the Product should ideally sold to a Customer). The difference in these two prices is the Margin which is the profit for MNZ. Depending on circumstances, the Product may be sold at any price, usually above the Buying Price.

2 Each Product has a base unit which can be Numbers, Boxes, etc. This should be user-definable. Certain spares are sold in Boxes contains dozen numbers. However, the Buying and Selling Price is applicable for one unit of the item.

3 The Pricing of the Product for sale in India is in Rupees. Currently these products are sold only in India. However, there are plans to sell these items in the Asia Pacific region and therefore, the proposed system should facilitate this transition. Products are bought from Principals based on the base Currency of the Principalâ„¢s country. The System should provide for currency conversion between the Principalâ„¢s currency and Indian rupees.

4 The Installation transaction refers to one Mainline Product and one product only. The transaction should also record Client/Site details and the CSE who handled the installation. Start and completion date/times of the Installation should be recorded along with the specific Client Contact person who approved and signed the installation report.

5 A Service Request transaction records a Customer Complain with the details of Client, Date, Time, Contact person, description of complaint and urgency. The Service Request may be assigned to a CSE at any time and not necessarily while the complaint is recorded. The Service Request will be given a token number which will be referred to until the call is completed. At the time of recording the call, it is important to find out if the Product is under Warranty or Maintenance Contract. The CSE should be advised about billing terms based on this status. All billing is done by Accounts and need not be taken care in the Customer Support system.

6 Multiple Service Call Transactions may be entered against a specific Service Request. Completion status should recorded against each of them along with date, time, duration of call etc. Each Service Call transaction would refer to the main Service Request.

7 A stores module needs to be developed by which spares can be issued against a Spares Request Transaction using a Spares Issue Slip. All spares transactions should refer to the Insstallation Number and the Service Request number so that these spares may be accounted for. On completion of calls, a Spares Usage report for the call along with the corresponding selling prices need to be generated.

8 On completion of a Call, a Call Billing Report needs to be generated which will outline the time spent by CSE on the call up to the point of completion, consumption of spares and a status indicating what needs to be charged based on the Warranty/Maintenance Contract terms.

9 A flexible Maintenance Contract module needs to be developed by which a Product can get into a Service contract based on the descriptions given in the earlier section.

10 An Online Alerts module should constantly alert a set of Customer Support Supervisors and the All India Customer Support manager whenever specific Service Requests are not attended to in time or if they take too long to resolve. The System should provide for defining benchmark standards for the following and then generate Email and Popup alerts whenever these benchmarks are flouted:

1. Service Request to First Service Call.
2. Service Request to Call Completion (Solving of the problem).
3. Service Requests that are not assigned to a CSE for more than n hours.

11 It should be possible to view or report on Service History under various parameters:

4. Service History for a specific Installation.
5. Service History for a Specific CSE
6. Service History for a specific Client (All installations)
7. Service History (Summary and detailed) for a Product Category.
This information should be viewable for a specified date/time range.

12 Various queries would be made to estimate time spent by CSE on various service calls. The Time spent report will give a good idea of how much costs MNZ is incurring on its Support operation. The following types of information would be needed:

8. Total Service Call time for a specific CSE over a period.
9. Total Service Call time for a specific Product over a period.
10. Total Service Call time for a specific Installation over a period.
11. Total Service Call time for a specific Client over a period.
12. Service Call time comparison for Products within a Product Category over a specified time period.
Technology and Environment
¢ Servers - Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2000
¢ Clients - Microsoft Internet Explorer
¢ Tools - Microsoft Visual Studio.NET
¢ Services - ASP.NET XML Web Services
¢ All database entities need to go through an XML Filter. This essentially means that all front-ends will use the XML schema ONLY and specific database updates or application integration tasks will happen through a specific service of this filter which will take care of context-specific translation.