Pitney Bowes is New Zealand’s leading supplier of office automation and audio visual equipment sales, leasing, and repair services.

Globally, Pitney Bowes has 35,000 employees serving two million customers in 130 countries. When Pitney Bowes decided to expand their presence in New Zealand by acquiring Hasler NZ, they did so because Hasler shared their commitment to providing first-class customer service and post-sale support.

Because Pitney Bowes sells and leases highly-specialized equipment, implementing and servicing it requires skilled, factory-trained technicians. These technicians cover the length and breadth of New Zealand from just three branch offices – Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Pitney Bowes’ customers are running a broad range of equipment, each requiring specific technical expertise.

Pitney Bowes’ after sales support is a key component of their overall solution: They offer ‘Full Service and Maintenance’ contracts as a form of insurance that regular monthly maintenance will keep their equipment running at its most efficient and to its full potential.

But if a breakdown does occur, the contract guarantees a response to any problem within four hours-at no additional charge to repair the fault.

Customers love the peace of mind that comes with Pitney Bowes’ service and maintenance contracts; for Pitney Bowes’ staff, however, these contracts create a difficult resource optimization dilemma: How to manage monthly maintenance commitments, while simultaneously meeting emergency response times, for clients in every corner of the country, each with a different piece of equipment?

"We outgrew our paper-based processes years ago," says Insert Name, Insert Title for Pitney Bowes. "Our legacy paper-based system was both inefficient and error-prone. Our office admin staff struggled to provide our technicians with the information they needed to do their jobs. At the same time, our technicians found it difficult to report back with an accurate accounting of parts and labor used in each job."

Finally, in early 2007, Pitney Bowes decided to take action.

"When we approached Activiser, they didn’t try to sell us a piece of software," says Mr Lastname of Pitney Bowes. "Instead, they asked a lot of insightful questions about our field services organization. These discussions yielded a list of requirements that they turned into a proposal describing precisely how Activiser could be configured to improve our operations."

One of those requirements was seamless integration with Pitney Bowes’ existing back-office systems.

"It was obvious from day one that a great deal of clever thinking went into Activiser’s architecture," continues Mr Lastname. "Activiser was easy to integrate. And it was a pleasure to work with the people behind the product-they were competent, friendly, and very responsive to all our questions. It was quite a painless process."

"Activiser took the paper out of my paper jobsheets," concludes Mr Lastname."Now I don’t have to chase my field team for job cards-I know where they are and what they are doing.

"Activiser is the best thing we’ve done this year. Senior management is happy because we’re hitting our targets. Our customers are happy because we’re ahead of the game. And our staff are happy because we improved-rather than changed-the way we do things.The guys at Activiser made it really easy."