After our recent blog on the benefits of on-premise, purpose-built CEBP solution platforms, we now want to start a series to present practical applications for how you can work and communicate more efficiently — in times of crisis as well as in day-to-day business. Let’s kickoff with a customer use case for leveraging DAKS for automated dispatch…

Waiting for someone to discover and report a problem can sometimes be too late. If a server room becomes too warm, an elevator fails or a system malfunctions, your staff needs to respond quickly. The efficacy of the response will determine the cost of the failure, both in financial and operational impact terms.

TTX Company Case Study
As a leading provider of railcars and related freight car management services to the North American rail industry, TTX invests in and operates technology solutions to improve the quality and efficiency of their business throughout their operations. Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) automate communication and collaboration activities into business workflows, minimizing the delays, miscommunications and omissions that often occur in business operations. TTX has leveraged DAKS to optimize several mission critical workflows, including Help Desk resolution of “severity one” issues, emergency broadcasts to their employee base, and automated notification and dispatch to engineering teams.

Within TTX, key servers are configured to send an automated e-mail to DAKS under defined conditions. The e-mail message contains specific information on the status of the server. DAKS uses text-to-speech technology to convert the email content into a voice announcement that is appended to a preamble message of “This is an important message from TTX.” DAKS then places simultaneous calls to all on-call engineers with the composite, situation-specific message.

To assure the problem is addressed in a timely fashion, TTX employs multiple contacts, call recurrences and escalations in their DAKS dialing logic. Each engineer can log on and off the system based on their on-call schedule and can designate the specific device to be contacted (mobile device versus home phone, for example). If no engineer responds on initial dial-out cycle, up to two more retries to each number at three-minute intervals are attempted. If still no response, the notification is escalated to a second team, then third and fourth.

Flexible Workflows
On a triggering event – whether by human activity such as a phone call or mouse click or automated like e-mail, API or other integration – DAKS can send voice, e-mail and/or text messages. If a fire sprinkler system engages or a security door is ajar, an alarm from a facilities management system can automatically initiate a DAKS Alert Notification to inform security and maintenance response teams. If a refrigerator with vaccines, medications or other perishable items suddenly fails, DAKS can notify maintenance before there is a significant loss.

Alert Notification workflows can ask for positive or negative responses to signal acceptance of a trouble ticket. Further, a two-step confirmation procedure is available. After confirming acceptance and then fixing the malfunction, the user will call DAKS and explicitly confirm with a "completed message" that the problem has been successfully resolved.

Enterprise Integration
As highlighted in our previous blog, an on-premise solution makes interfacing to in-house systems and monitoring points easier, more direct and more secure. DAKS can be tightly integrated to your organization’s existing infrastructure and systems. With a focus on operations continuity, it can notify the appropriate resources within an organization when a monitored situation crosses a threshold. DAKS interfaces with a variety of third party systems via a wide range of hardware and software interfaces and protocols.

DAKS is highly flexible, allowing you to tailor solutions to your business workflows, capacity demands and third-party integration requirements. To talk more about CEBP, your operational workflow requirements and how Impact can assist you with your critical incident response and business processes, contact us today. We cannot wait to talk to you about the many benefits and possibilities to use DAKS in your enterprise — to save time, secure employees and customers, communicate better and make your overall work processes more efficient.