An automated dispatching system frunishes a repro house with efficient and cost-effective courier solutions
To make its print order delivery system more efficient so as to accommodate increased business, Seattle-based Olymic Reprographics recently purchased an automated dispatching system from ASCAR Business Systems, Glendale, California.

Previously, Olympic-which has been supplying blueprints, lithographic printing, high-volume photocopying, and photo processing services for architects, engineers, and designers for 50 years-tracked job pickup and delivery via an antiquated pencil-and-paper system that listed delivery areas, drivers in service, client information, and scheduling priorities.

"It was getting so complicated that we were sending drivers all over the city instead of keeping them in particular regions," recalls Olympic president Lynnette Briggs. "Plus, record keeping was very difficult. We found it tough to track information like how many deliveries a particular driver was doing in a month's time, what areas a driver was coveringm and how long it would take from pickup to delivery."

Ease of Use
Briggs says that one of the first things that Olympic personnel noticed and liked about the system was the fact that the program's interface was not very complicated, therby affording them may ways to access pertinent information.

"The dispatchers here like the fact that there's a lot less writing that has to be done now," reports the Olympic dispatcher Clark Ostrom. "It saves us a lot of time. Now we just enter a few letteres or numbers, and the customer's information comes up in a few seconds. Before we got the system, we had to write everything down on regular-size sheets of paper, then write it again on a big scheduling board. In the old days, we had to ask the same information every time a call came in," he adds.

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