Wavelink Case Studies

America West Speeds Reliable Airmail Delivery With Wavelink

"Wavelink´s Studio EDGE was as billed: It helped us develop a robust application in under 65 days that handles thousands of transactions a day over the AT&T network." Joe Beery, sr. vice president and chief information officer at America West

CHALLENGE

Deploy an airmail-tracking system that satisfies stringent requirements within four months or lose a lucrative contract. Those were the terms the United States Postal Service gave the domestic air carriers that delivered its mail. The means for complying with such a mandate were up to each airline, but the deadline would not budge.

America West, the second-largest low-fare airline in the United States, had to develop a tracking system from scratch, and that system had to be reliable, easy to use, and quickly deployed. There was no time for mistakes or delays.

Postal Service requirements were explicit. "We were asked to track mail at four stops--when it was delivered to us, when it was loaded onto a plane, when it was transferred, and when it was delivered to its final destination," said Joe Beery, sr. vice president and chief information officer at America West. "Every time we touched a piece of mail, we had to scan it." Data from those scans had to reach the Postal Service within two hours of capture.

America West workers in 50 airport mail stations across the continental United States would be learning a new way to process mail. Yet their learning curve could not seriously disrupt the mail´s flow rate. Making the new tracking system too complicated could slow production to the point of noncompliance.

SOLUTION

Wavelink´s Studio EDGE gave America West the tools it needed to speed application development.

"Studio EDGE was very out-of-the-box friendly for us to be able to do the development and integrate," Beery said. "Wavelink´s Studio product is robust, it´s easy to use and it worked well with the device we´re using."

The tracking system used an Intermec 760 mobile computer with scanning capability to capture bar-code data from mail, an AT&T wireless wide-area network for transmitting the data between America West and the Postal Service, and Wavelink´s Studio EDGE as the application-development platform to run it all.

"Studio EDGE was designed to tightly integrate with a number of devices, including the Intermec 760, and to provide the flexibility to work across multiple networks. That means America West software programmers didn´t have to write a lot of code for the application," said Eric Hermelee, Wavelink´s vice president of marketing. "We had abstracted much of the coding for an easy approach, with wizards and graphical elements to speed the design of the screens. Our products provide developers with a high degree of control while taking the labor-intensive programming out of the equation."

Not only is application design easier with Studio EDGE, deployment is a matter of installing the application onto any certified server that runs a Java Virtual Machine and letting the server administer it. No dedicated server is necessary.

CASE STUDY

Beery lauds Wavelink for its quick response time under pressure and its product´s ability to deliver. "Studio EDGE was as billed: It helped us develop a robust application in under 65 days that handles thousands of transactions a day over the AT&T network."

Studio EDGE´s adaptability proved crucial to the success of the tracking system.

"Wavelink enabled the software to turn the mobile computer´s radio on and off automatically," he said. "That substantially boosted the life expectancy of the battery. It had a huge impact on the operation. Anytime a worker has to stop to swap batteries or recharge a device, you´re interrupting the operation. We needed that feature to make deployment successful.

"The other thing is Wavelink designed the software to shield the mail load handlers from getting to the native operating system. Handlers usually got themselves in a bind where they would inadvertently do something to disable the software. Now they can´t."

Dealing with a wide-area network can add its own set of problems. "You have issues in a wider area, where you lose connectivity, just like when you´re on your cell phone and you drop a call," said Wavelink´s Hermelee. "Studio EDGE is built to navigate such obstacles. You can write rules into the application that say, ´Whenever a mobile computer is off-line, keep caching the data on the device so work can continue uninterrupted. Once the connection is reestablished, upload the data according to a predetermined priority.´"

High priority, in America West´s case, would be any mail-tracking data that had to get to the Postal Service within the required two-hour timeframe.

With the software preconfigured and wireless wide-area network coverage in place, America West flew its mobile computers to all 50 airport mail stations across the United States. Training was brief. "The application is simple," Beery said. "It´s intuitive. We tried to make it as automated as we could so that learning to use it wasn´t a long, involved process."

BENEFITS

By meeting a tight deadline for a mandated mail-tracking system, America West removed a major risk to its Postal Service contract.

Owning the Studio EDGE software platform gives America West the freedom to use it as the basis for other applications.

"Because of the way we did the development, and because of the flexibility of this system, when we deploy it to do other things--like air freight scanning--that´s when we´re going to really begin to generate savings," Beery said. "This initial deployment was based on the requirements that came from the Postal Service. That´s what this first deployment was all about--saving the business of being able to carry the mail."

ABOUT WAVELINK

Wavelink Corporation is a leading provider of wireless communications software and the developer of a wireless platform that enables enterprises to develop, manage and deploy wireless applications. Since 1992, Wavelink´s innovative software has powered a growing number of Fortune 1,000 companies and is rapidly becoming a standard in wireless network development, deployment and management, with more than 40,000 installations in over 50 countries. Wavelink supports the world´s most popular programming languages and device operating systems, and has extended its expertise from wireless local area networks (WLAN) to the wireless wide area networks (WWAN) space. For more information, please visit www.wavelink.com or call +1-425-823-0111.