Automated Problem Reporting

Nowadays, malfunction of office equipment has to be reported to a repair center manually, by phone for example, usually by someone who unluckily has been operating the machine when it malfunctions. It is difficult for some people to describe machine status in detail. The following is an example of automation of trouble reporting by a Salutation enabled machine.

Let's say we have an on-line multifunction copier/scanner/printer which suffers with paper transport problems. With Salutation, the copier starts a sequence to find an Office Equipment Administrator - a service machine - in the network. A response from an Administrator machine requests details of the trouble. The copier makes up a trouble report, gathering information associated with the machine malfunction and sends it to the Administrator machine. The trouble report indicates that a trained service person is required to fix the problem. When receiving the report, the Administrator machine verifies and logs the problem for later statistical analysis. After searching repair schedules and available resource data, the Administrator machine sends the report to the assigned repair technician via pager, requesting on-site service. The service person responds with a coded message indicating estimated time of arrival at the location of the machine. The service machine, knowing the capabilities of the copier's display, formats an "Out of Order" message for the specific copier interface with a posting for estimated time for correction.

Salutation Behind the Scenes

1. The copier uses Salutation's Search Capabilities to locate the Administrator machine and a Salutation Service Request to open a data pipe for transmission of the problem report.

2. The Administrator machine uses Salutation Data Transmission to request the problem report from the device

3. With Salutation Protocol, the capabilities of the repair specialist's pager can be determined, and the error report can tailored to meet these capabilities. For example, if the pager has text capabilities, a message can be formatted to the characteristics of the output screen, If the repair specialist has a pager component on his/her hand held, the Administrator machine may send a .txt file containing the problem report. The capability exchange with the pager will also determine the input characteristics, identifying how the repair specialist will respond to the problem report.

4. There is no standard established for the displays on multifunction devices. For any given device, the display technology may be LEDs, LCD alpha panel, LCD graphics panel or other technology with varying size and PEL densities. The Salutation Protocol's Capabilities Exchange provides a mechanism for the Administrator machine to determine the specifics of the multifunction device's display, and the Administrator machine can tailor its messages accordingly.