Contruction Firm Trims Tech Support Costs with PeekPlus
When Bob Dylan recorded his 1969 album Nashville Skyline, both Dylan and Nashville looked considerably different from the way they appear today. Changes in Dylan's appearance during the past three decades are due primarily to aging. However, the changes in the Nashville skyline are attributable in large part to Brasfield & Gorrie Construction LLC (www.brasfieldgorrie.com), a leading construction company that has recently improved its own infrastructure with the installation of PeekPlus, an AS/400 monitoring utility from Bytware.
A Forbes 500 company ranked as the nation's 59th largest building contractor by the trade journal Engineering News Record, Brasfield & Gorrie has headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama, with regional offices in Atlanta, Orlando, Nashville, and Raleigh, and manages projects at as many as 130 job sites in 16 states simultaneously. Brasfield & Gorrie has erected multi-story office buildings, hotels, condominiums, retail developments, healthcare facilities, parking structures, manufacturing facilities, and water treatment plants throughout the South.
The award-winning company built the frame for the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, the 32-story Harbert Plaza office tower in Birmingham, the Kelsey-Seybold Clinic Main Campus in Houston, the University of Georgia's Performing and Visual Arts Center, and the 30-story South Central Bell Tennessee Headquarters, the tallest building on the Nashville skyline.
The Problem
The growth of the company during the past two decades through so many remote operations presented challenges for its central computer system operations. The company's technical support staff was stretched to practical limits when Steve Gilbert came on board as senior systems administrator in April 2000. Technicians were spending much of their time trying to diagnose technical problems that users in remote locations could only describe to them over the phone. With disruptive frequency, technical support personnel were forced to travel to the company's offices or job sites in other cities to properly diagnose and resolve problems or provide training assistance.
The Solution
Gilbert had first become acquainted with PeekPlus in 1996, when a previous employer of his installed it. "I discovered that it was an excellent troubleshooting tool, and I've purchased PeekPlus for every company where I've worked since," Gilbert said. PeekPlus is designed to simplify remote training. It gives system administrators the ability to view the keystrokes of any user. Because of that capability, PeekPlus is also an important diagnostic tool for technical support personnel—and that's how Gilbert put it to work at Brasfield & Gorrie. He installed PeekPlus on Brasfield & Gorrie's AS/400 system, which controls accounting and construction estimating functions for all of the company's LAN- and WAN-linked offices throughout five states.The company's midrange box is an IBM S20 server running OS/400 V4R4. The WAN links the S20 with about 70 PCs running Microsoft Windows 98. The PCs in those remote offices communicate with the S20 using Client Access. Users on the job sites typically connect through either of two methods: via frame relay using Client Access, or through a modem dial-up connection to the Internet, using a Web interface to the S20.
The construction estimating software resident on the S20 processes equipment, labor, and materials costs for prospective jobs for which field offices are bidding. Computers at active construction sites continually feed data to the S20 to analyze whether or not each job is being performed within budget. The accuracy of the data is vital to the company's financial vitality. Gilbert notes that PeekPlus helped Brasfield & Gorrie's IT department to maintain an efficient technical support operation despite the growth of the company.
"We have a very large user base, with about 500 individuals accessing the S20, but we're able to run a small shop of only three AS/400 technicians because I rarely have to dispatch them to remote locations," Gilbert said. "If I have to dispatch a technician to a job site, that can get really expensive. But if the technician can diagnose a problem over the phone, that can save hundreds of dollars, even by the most conservative estimate."
Remote Control
Although it is imperceptible to the end users calling for assistance, PeekPlus lets Gilbert or one of the other technicians view the keystrokes and the screen images of any user, local or remote.
"Because we can see keystrokes as they're typed and view error messages, we can really pinpoint errors. For example, we received a call the other day from a user who was unable to change the printer for the checks being generated from an accounts payable application. So I watched my screen as the bookkeeper typed, and on the phone I was able to describe to her how to reconfigure the application to send the checks to the printer she wanted to use. If not for PeekPlus, that tech support call would have meant a trip to her office." PeekPlus also permits tech support personnel and users to communicate in "chat" mode through a pop-up window on the screen. "Another user in a remote location reported a date problem while trying to run a query, and the job log did not identify the source of the error. With PeekPlus, I saw that the date range entered contained an extra zero. When it was removed, the report ran fine," Gilbert said.
In addition to its monitoring functions, PeekPlus has advanced diagnostic and recovery features through its ability to send CL commands to jobs. For example, a system administrator can use it to access QTEMP objects, change the LDA, grant authorities, and activate and control numerous other functions. PeekPlus can also play a role in developing training materials and procedural documentation by virtue of its ability to record screens to files that can be opened through word-processing applications. PeekPlus has a PDM-like interface and does not require any system changes. Gilbert calls PeekPlus the essence of simplicity and efficiency.
"PeekPlus loads very easily from the CD with one command, and I've never had a problem with it." Gilbert's view about the reliability and utility of PeekPlus, then, could be summed up with the title of another Bob Dylan composition: "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. "
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Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: PeekPlus
Customer: Brasfield & Gorrie
Summary
Although it is imperceptible to the end users calling for assistance, PeekPlus allows technicians at Birmingham-based Brasfield & Gorrie to view the keystrokes and the screen images of any user, local or remote, to provide better service and solve issues faster.
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