A NEW data communications system has been developed for Pump & Forecourt Services, which makes maintenance calls to around 2,000 garage forecourts throughout Ireland. It uses Eircell's Short Message Service (SMS) and Data Transfer System to eliminate phone calls and paperwork - Pump & Forecourt Services deals with about 15,000 calls a year. The system sends a message of up to 160 characters to the screen of a SMS enabled GSM phone, while the Data Transfer System allows datafiles to be sent. These Eircell services aren't yet generally available.
The £100,000 system was developed by Field Efficiency Systems Ltd (FES) of Limerick. FES's Technical Director, John Gleeson, says similar systems could be used by firms such as taxi, delivery and courier services, and haulage contractors.
Previously, when a call was received and logged at Pump & Forecourt Services' call centre in Dublin, the operator would then phone a service engineer; when the job was finished, the engineer would fill in a form manually, and the details would later be typed into the main computer.
Thirty of the company's vans now have on-board computers linked to GSM earphones. Request calls are logged onto the main computer by the telephonist as before, but the computer automatically passes the message to a communications server. This converts it into SMS format and sends it over GSM to the Eircell network. Eircell's SMS Centre locates the recipient and sends the short message.
SMS messages are normally sent and received as a continuous string. But the Pump & Forecourt Services system puts dividers in the SMS message so that when it is received in the van, it appears under headings such as site address, site code, and nature of the fault.
The hardware involved is a Nokia 6080 car phone, linked to a special computer made by Finnish company Aplicom. This has a multitasking operating system which is quite different from DOS, 05/2 or Windows 95. Its microprocessor is roughly the equivalent of a 386. Pump & Forecourt Services is also planning to use the Global Positioning System within the year to improve usage of the vans.
"We expect to have a digital map of the country, showing the 2,000 service stations, and to locate our vans on this," says managing director, Denis Bergin. "This will mean that we will be locate the nearest van and be able to tell the station how long the call will take."