Modernizing Your Business Applications with Enterprise RIA

How web enabling their services business with Enterprise RIA is helping Panasonic become the number one company worldwide in Customer Satisfaction.

Company
Panasonic is one of the world's most-recognized brand names, largely on the basis of its highly successful Panasonic AVC Networks business segment. The division manufactures and markets the majority of the company's consumer products, including plasma TVs and LCD monitors, Blu-ray and DVD players, digital cameras, video recorders, home theater systems and many other products. But while Panasonic welcomes strong sales, the reality is that the more diverse and successful its product lines become, the greater the challenge for its service department becomes.

Customer Challenges
Panasonic AVC's service division has simple objectives: discover and respond to potential quality and safety issues as early as possible in the product lifecycle. And, from the standpoint of safety, ensure absolutely safe operation of all electrical products over the long term. Sounds simple enough, but with an evolving product line that gets ever more complex, Panasonic service technicians have to continually educate themselves on new technologies and new repair techniques. But while it is critical that Panasonic technicians stay up-to-date with the latest technology improvements and developments, how do you make that happen for a huge global workforce that is responsible for thousands of products and product parts?

Panasonic AVC approaches this challenge through what it calls the Voice Of Engineering (VOE). An enterprise-wide program, VOE encompasses all the initiatives and activities geared toward discovering potential critical issues in product quality by sharing and analyzing information and trends. This includes an ongoing dialog between service technicians the field and company management to uncover potential quality issues, and nurture and advance repair and servicing capabilities in the field. The company's technological approach to its service challenges was to create an automated system-built on the Curl RIA Enterprise platform-to provide its service and support staff with up-to-date repair manuals, parts diagrams, specification sheets, and other kinds of documentation.

Solution
Panasonic AVC Networks chose Curl as the development platform for its Service Information Sharing System because it provides the ideal environment for live documentation and interactive education. Initially Panasonic AVC used a database application as its service support information system. That system had numerous limitations, however, which is why Panasonic AVC decided to develop a new application, one that would:

• Ensure an immediacy of data - integration with external documents in format such as Excel and PDF
• Deliver intuitive operability, not requiring any special skill to use the application
• Enable service support staff all over the world to use of the application

Another advantage of the Curl-powered Service Information Sharing System is that it enabled Panasonic AVC to retain the comprehensive information storage capabilities of its existing database system, yet enhance the capabilities of that system with a powerful and flexible front end. Curl makes complicated screen controls possible, surpassing ordinary Web browser capabilities, so Panasonic developers built in the kind of advanced features and functions typically found only in client server type applications. For instance, the Panasonic system enables users to view documents and related information in a single view. To access documents and files, users browse indexes or use keyword search. In practice, field engineers and service technicians simply type in keywords and then narrow down their selections out of the returned list screen. This powerful search tool provides Panasonic field engineers with instant access to the vast amount of repair documentation and related information across the company. VOE Search structures information using syntactic analysis, morphologic analysis and a dictionary tool (tautology or synonym), and displays the associated information ranked against the keyword. The application draws on documents, files and associated information from several databases.

Main functionality includes search for repair parts or technical documents, as well as bulletin boards to share the information and analysis views of repair processes. These discussion boards enable users to ask questions and get answers from colleagues and associates around the world. All correspondences on the bulletin board are searchable so it can be listed by the search. As users use the application, know-how or information are accumulated organically to speed the maintenance of information. With Curl's flexible file-handling properties and standard APIs for external applications, documents can be viewed right within the system interface-there's no need to open new applications such as Excel or Acrobat. In addition, Curl's elastic technology allows users to adjust the size of documents as appropriate. Operations for changing chart type, targeting parts on and off, displaying above or below a certain point, were all designed and implemented to make the interface intuitive and convenient.

Further, the application provides a "Repair Trend" view, primarily used by management, which enables them to track service activity by product, product category and date (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.) to better understand service issues and uncover potential problems.

Business Benefits
In summary, the Curl RIA solution

• Provided accurate, timely information technicians and managers require to provide optimal service and safety
• Improved response times and expanded service capabilities
• Centralized all service information and intelligence within a single view
• Eased system deployment, scaled to handle new users and numerous global offices
• Eliminated the inconvenience and usability issues of typical web applications