Leatherhead, United Kingdom and Sterling, VA January 29, 2002 Categoric Software, a provider of event management and alerting (EM&A) technology, released software that automatically telephones customers to alert them to supply chain exceptions, like delivery delays, and gives them the opportunity to immediately take action.
Call recipients can respond to a list of actions offered by the software either by speaking or selecting responses through the keypad on their mobile phones. Thousands of such calls could be initiated and handled at the same time by a single computer rather than human staff.
"Xalerts 5.1 facilitates the 'Do It Now' culture by enabling machines to seek an immediate response rather than waiting for humans to notice that something is wrong," said Safi Captan, chief technology officer and founder of Categoric Software.
In addition, advanced automated escalation features in Xalerts 5.1 ensure that any deviation from plan is not only detected, but also acted upon. According to Categoric Software, the system can alert the person immediately responsible for a problematic event through any communication device or channel but if that person does not respond or take action within a specified time the system will automatically escalate the alert to the individual's colleague or manager.
The personalized alerts delivered by Xalerts 5.1 are based on rules set either by the sender or the recipient. The supplier of a product could set up a rule so that in the event of a delay the system will automatically telephone the customer and verbally give them options to re-schedule, order an alternative product, cancel the order or speak to an operator.
Xalerts is mostly used in supply chain applications but most enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) suppliers are also seeking to add such real-time multi-channel event management functionality to their products.
Xalerts 5.1 runs on Windows and UNIX and is available immediately.
