Company Overview
Robert Bosch Tool Corporation is a leading worldwide producer of power tools. Bosch’s products are well known in the industry as being solid, professional grade products that have excellent reputations for reliability and maintainability.

Synopsis
In 2002, Bosch developed a new line of cordless products that would take a leading role in determining professional quality and vendor service levels. The ProVantage Protection Plan was developed to provide customers with a high sense of commitment to the operation and maintenance of their purchase. The plan provided for an aggressive replacement and repair program for the new cordless tool line.

To accompany the new ProVantage plan, a customer registration portal and customer service application were envisioned. This system would include the registering of products, submission of requests for service, and status of an ongoing service request.

The system for processing products had to be robust. The program could sell as many as one hundred thousand products in the first couple of months. Bosch looked to Triton-Tek to architect, implement, maintain, and host the ProVantage solution.

Solution
Triton-Tek examined the problem domain and the emerging technologies of the time and developed Bosch’s first web service driven n-tier application. The architecture was to build a flexible engine for future expansion and extensibility. Web services provided a means of logical and physical separation of core business logic and presentation in the solution.

The application was built within the time constraints for the product launch and has successfully grown since 2002. The application was originally built using ASP.NET 1.0 with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as the database engine. Application level asymmetric encryption is used to store sensitive information in the database.

The application is used by hundreds of customers today and logs many service requests per year. The system maintains status across the United States on the status of all customer service requests for ProVantage protection plan usage.

Since its original deployment, the system has received dozens of functionality enhancements, product additions, and technology upgrades. New features, such as the addition of Blue Core battery management has been added that extended the system’s use and impact.

The system in 2007 is hosted on SQL Server 2005 using ASP.NET 2.0. As new technologies have come out, their impact has been evaluated and re-factored into the project as appropriate when functionality changes are requested. This commitment to maintaining not only the functionality but the technology base allows Triton-Tek to leverage new and emerging technologies to drive future business value.

The solution is also hosted by Triton-Tek on redundant clusters of servers to provide high availability. All three tiers of the application are independently clustered to provide fault tolerance and automatic fail-over/fail-back. Triton-Tek has grown the solution infrastructure as the project’s scope has increased. Our solution has avoided high upfront expenditures for scalability and allowed for horizontal scaling as the need appears.

Results
Since the launch of the Bosch ProVantage solution in 2002, Robert Bosch Tool Corporation has experienced many benefits. Customer and internal satisfaction is very high with a solution decreases operating costs, provides high customer service and customer contact. Significant benefits include:

• Faster customer service handling when customers call customer service. This drives towards lower customer service costs as seconds are cost in handling customer requests.
• High reliability - the site possesses a 99.9% uptime rate. This ensures full availability to all customers.
• Marked improvement in customer satisfaction over prior warranty programs. Customer feelings of satisfaction are higher and their affiliation with the Bosch brand grows.
• Significant savings in manual process workflows of managing service requests nationally from a central system with better tracking and increased visibility into operations.
• Increases in large customers purchasing dozens or hundreds of tools and using the system to help manage their tool inventory.

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