Fujifilm pictures its customers more clearly with IBM

Fujifilm Electronic Imaging (FFEI) designs and builds high-end pre-press solutions, such as image scanning, colour management and workflow software. Established in 1997, the company employs more than 330 staff within the UK and sells worldwide via Fujifilm subsidiaries and third-party distributors. FFEI is Fujifilm’s only subsidiary which designs, manufactures and markets products for Fujifilm outside Japan.

Primary technical support for customers is provided by distributors, reinforced by the Product Quality and Technical Support Team based in Hemel Hempstead, UK. The knowledge-base built from interaction with customers provides insight into how products are being used and what future developments might be required.

FFEI had adopted Lotus Notes and Domino for its messaging environment, and a Lotus Notes and Domino application developed for tracking communications between customers, distributors and technical support teams was working well. However, there was no systematic way to report on, collate and distribute the valuable comments and suggestions that arose in these communications.

Bob Willis, Product Quality and Customer Support Manager, comments, “We had to adapt our processes to fit the system. For example, engineers were having to cut and paste information from e-mails into the system. Reporting was not adequate and the solution didn’t handle attachments at all well. Too much time was being spent managing the system, rather than getting on with our real task – solving people’s technical support issues.”


Brighter image with IBM
FFEI reviewed a total of seven possible alternatives, and opted to work with Kelros, an IBM Premier Business Partner, choosing to deploy its Lotus Domino based kelros.sales and kelros.support solutions.

Bob Willis explains: “The high quality of training that FFEI provides to its distributor community means that most technical issues can be solved in the field without recourse to the head office support facility. Those that require second- or third-line support are generally quite complex, and we deal with a relatively small number of problems, requiring extensive communication between distributor and support engineers.

“These cases can generate long text fields on which a support system would need to be able to carry out full text searches, and only Lotus Notes and Domino could provide that level of capability.”


Picture-perfect people productivity
The key to the new solution is the integration of customer and sales interactions with Lotus Notes and Domino workflows and advanced search facilities. The solution has significantly boosted FFEI's people productivity. The technical support team has been able to increase the number of support calls it fields without adding more staff, and to track all correspondence for use in future development activities.

FFEI's distributors can now access higher-quality information, gain easier access to technical expertise and receive more timely responses from FFEI support personnel. The system improves tracking and monitoring of service requests, with statistical analysis of time-to-resolution for support calls. This enables reporting on service level agreement performance, with auditing and monitoring of assistance request suggestions and responses.


Highlighting the contrasts
“The knowledge and understanding showed by Kelros gave us confidence that they could make significant changes to their solution to meet our needs.” Bob Willis continues, “They gave us guidance about which areas of our specification could be improved, which might prove a risk and what could realistically be altered to deliver a better return on our investment.”

With more than 1,000 users able to access the system and a core of 150 key users, extensive training could have been costly and intrusive, reducing the take up of the system and removing the benefits of implementing it. The Kelros solutions were modified to deliver full functionality to technical support staff via both Lotus Notes clients and Web browsers, while providing distributors with a subset of the view and functionality via Web browsers only.

“We wanted to provide information our way, and only Lotus Notes and Domino gave us the flexibility to do that,” comments Bob Willis. “We wanted the history of the call, with the direction of the communication, to be clear from a single main page. With help from Kelros, we have achieved a solution that matches our business processes, rather than having our software define the way we work.”

He continues, “It’s a testament to the system that we’re now handling more calls – support performance has increased because of efficiencies in the system, but also because our distributors are realising its value and ease of use. We believe that our support offering is the best in the industry, and we're determined to maintain that lead. The Kelros team and IBM software are helping Fujifilm Electronic Imaging to achieve that goal."