Helping Pink Jeep See More Green

For Paul Giovanni , vice president of Software Innovations, a Sedona, Arizona-based computer consultant, the ability to run Windows NT as an application server for the BackOffice family is a compelling argument for boarding the BackOffice bandwagon. Among his projects was the reworking of the reservation system for Pink Jeep Tours, a Sedona tour company that drives tourists to remote desert locations, taking advantage of special permits from the U.S. National Fore st Service. The distinctive Pepto-Bismol-colored vehicles provide what most vacationers crave: a look beyond the tourist traps to see the landscapes that only locals usually glimpse.

However, with Pink Jeep's bookings rising to more than 60,000 per year and cutbacks in permits, the company required a more precise and easier-to-use way to match touris ts with empty Jeep seats than the old System 36-based reservation approach provided.

The answer was a new system that was built on a selective mix of BackOffice products -- NT Server and SQL Server -- along with clients running Windows 95 and Office. Microsoft's Visual C++ provided much of the programming resources. Pink Jeep runs the client/server system on a mix of Compaq Proliant Servers and Pentium PCs.

"In the past, it took 4-5 minutes to book a reservation," says Giovanni, who began the project in 1995. "Now it takes about 45 seconds." The result: a 30 percent increase in bookings and greater efficiency in organizing tours.

Six seats are available in each tour Jeep, and to help fill those seats, the reservation staff can see on-screen the spaces that are open for each driver on any given day, and how long each tour is scheduled to last. If a customer cancels a reservation, the change is posted to the network in about 10 seconds to give the company the chance to rebook seats.

The old system also provided this information, but it did so with cryptic codes, which Giovanni says "meant nothing to anybody." Rather than spending time tracking down vacancies or sending out Jeeps that aren't fully loaded, the reservation staff now can clearly see the data it needs to do on-the-fly load balancing.

Giovanni isn't a BackOffice bigot; he credits NetWare as king of file and print services and says Novell Directory Services (NDS) is still "second to none." "But throughput to the desktop is not there" for an implementation such as Pink Jeep's.

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Paul Giovanni

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"In the past, it took 4-5 minutes to book a reservation. Now it takes about 45 seconds." --Paul Giovanni