The Challenge

American Express TRS, BIO GCE (By Invitation Only, Gold Card Events) is an operation involved in ticket sales. Due to their sales volume and the special needs of the card member they needed to upgrade their present system. They required the upgrade to become Y2K compliant but also to enhance their service and save money from licensing fees and better handling of each card member.

American Express needed a system to sell tickets to special events where Gold & Platinum card members are invited. They contacted Vitaver & Associates Inc. because of their reputation as solid performers and their history of delivering on time and on budget complex applications.

The Problem

The existing legacy system was not Y2K compliant and already failing for tickets sold past 1999.
• Licensing fees of existing system were significantly affecting profits and with poor service from the system contributed to even higher overhead due to poor system performance;
• Staffing training, system delays, poor system flow all contributed to poor user productivity and high frustration levels from the staff not to mention higher costs from its poor performance;
• Customers complained that orders where not handled efficiently;
• Orders for tickets going into year 2000 needed to be taken manually;
• Hardware supporting system was also aged and failing frequently leading to significant down time;
• Support from the hardware manufacturers and software publishers were non-existent.

The Solution

After a thorough assessment of the situation Vitaver & Associates understood that the Client required more than Y2K compliance. Vitaver & Associates offered a complete plan that afforded cost effective solutions to the Client, and addressed all the problems they had not foreseen before. The problems listed above became the flow chart for the solution.
• Client is no longer paying high licensing fees for users, system is maintained in-house and is user friendly;
• Client eliminated the taxing licensing fees and saved $100,000 a year just in licensing fees and had a better product to boot;
• Employees training was reduced to only a few hours from several days;
• Employee productivity increased by 50% as they were able to complete an order in approximately 3 minutes as opposed to a little more than 6 minutes before;
• Client satisfaction increased as searches and order tracking were significantly faster and more efficient;
• Orders for the year 2000 were able to be taken and tracked by the system;
• Hardware updates assure that their entire system was Y2K compliant and optimized for future growth as well;
• Employee satisfaction received a boost with the use of a friendlier, more intuitive system.

The Vitaver Difference

Vitaver & Associates, Inc. was able to:
• Save Client well over $100,000 per year;
• Reduce per ticket cost to only 50 cents per ticket;
• Bring Client’s system into 100% Y2K compliance;
• Improve employee productivity and moral;
• Solution was delivered on time and under budget.