Heartland Services
Overview
Heartland Services has offices in Chicago, Illinois and Leawood, Kansas. As the national service provider for Panasonic’s mobile computing devices, Heartland provides rapid repair services for laptop computers, projectors, point of sale systems and many other devices. The thousands of items serviced by Heartland each year are received, repaired or replaced and delivered back to their owners in record breaking time and all with Heartland's stamp of passionate commitment to excellence in every interaction.
Challenge
As Heartland's reputation for extraordinary service return has grown the number of transactions and complexity of work has eclipsed the capacity of their current information systems. In early 2006, Heartland hired and contracted an in-house group of developers to begin to redesign the old system. After months of work with unsatisfactory progress, Heartland scrapped the internal effort and asked Trabon to conduct an analysis and make recommendations for how to proceed.
Strategies and Tactics
Trabon's initial six week engagement consisted of building a set of requirements that would serve as the basis for the architecture of the new system and making recommendations for how to approach the project. At the completion of the discovery phase, Trabon validated and then delivered their findings and recommendations, high-level systems architecture, technology approach, a project time line and other documentation that would serve as the foundation for the building of the system. Heartland ultimately accepted Trabon’s recommendations and engaged Trabon to build HeartSmart, the company's vital new system software which is designed to automate multiple call centers; service/repair operations; parts & inventory; billing & administration; asset management & reporting, and provide direct access to 3rd party customers & channel partners through dedicated web portals.
Results
Scheduled for completion in mid 2008, HeartSmart will provide:
- A solid foundation for continued fast growth for the company
- The ability to add multiple additional manufacturers and service lines for increased revenue
- High gain and easy to access insight regarding operational work flow
- Communication portals for compressed time frames to manage inventory, logistics and collaboration with manufacturing partners and other service providers
Application
