QUALITY SERVICE AT A PROFIT

Copystatic Ltd entered the photocopying sales and maintenance market‐place in tire early 1970s, going through a boom and then a price war. In order to stay in business, the company took the decision to offer customers added value in the form of quality field service, or “uptime”. It recognised a need to have more effective control over its servicing activities and it was decided that a computer system would be the only effective solution. Consultants were commissioned to locate suitable software, but none existed, so the company was forced to develop the system in‐house. After nine years of development and £2 million of investment, the system, known as Copystatic software, is now the market‐leading management information system for organisations involved in field service and repair. During the early part of 1987, Copystatic was awarded BS 5750 certification from the British Standards Institution for excellence in customer engineering services. Without a computer system to control such a vast service operation, this would have been impossible to achieve.