It's is certainly an option, an other option would be to get a license for more supervisors, the licenses can be 1,5 or 10 supervisors.

Also you could use regular wallboards.

Now I know these options are not cheap, and you probarbly would not have them fast, have you looked in to VuStat buttons on the phone sets.
You can do a lot with those...

Please let me know if the information that was provided is helpfull.
Edwin Plat
A.K.A. Europe

Thanks for the input, but the Wallboards wont do it since we have 35 people that need to be displayed simultaneously - and the Wallboards are only 4-line maximum. That wouldn't allow all the ACD members to be displayed at the same time.

We hooked-up a 27-inch TV to a computer with TV-out and ran the BCMSvu app, and it works pretty well. We think we are going to install 4 TV's on the walls with 4 computers running BCMSvu for the entire call-center to see at quick-glance. So far - thats the only way it will work unless there is some Lucent wireless device that would work...but we doubt thats an option at this point.

Thanks for the feedback, Europe.

Pbxman
Systems Administrator

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Would you be able to use projection to get one screen large enough?  A Proxima perhaps?

We tried that (we have an NEC 1040MT), but our call center is too brightly lit to project effectively. This would have been ideal for us since it projects an image 6 feet wide, but it's just not bright enough, and the next series higher that would have the lumens we need is WAY above our price range. Ours was about $5K, and the one we'd need is $20K.

Currently - our proposed solution would cost $3500 for the TV's, Computers, and mounting hardware to put the TV's on the wall. The budget allows for around $8K for a solution.

Im really starting to think our current solution (with the TVs) is the only way to do it quickly and cheaply. I have to purchase today to have it all installed and working by the 14th.

Thanks again for all your help guys.

Pbxman
Systems Administrator

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Just one more thought.  How about running bcms real time on one machine and sharing with the other Supervisors PC's using NetMeeting or a similiar App.  I haven't tried it but it sounds like it might work.  

-Filakio

Unfortunately that wouldnt work either. The whole "goal" of the project is to have the BCMSdata available in a large call center for easy-view. People walking around, supervisors, employees should all be able to see whats going on from their desks with a quick glance. We wouldnt be able to use PC's for this. THats why a wallboard would be ideal, but it cannot display all of the agents logged into the ACD splits simultaneously. It would have to scroll through all of the agents on a wallboard.

We're going for basically the same thing as in the airport flight terminals..screens that show arrival times, departure times, etc...but instead of that - displaying the BCMSvu agent data so anyone could easily see it.

Pbxman
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It's not exactly what you want but...

You could use the Netmeeting Idea for employees stationary PC's and offer Supervisors wireless networked PDA's.

VLG711

VLG,

We looked into that wireless option, but were unable to come up with software that would allow BCMSvu to run on them. We looked into IPAQs and Sony slim laptops, but the Windows CE platform is incompatible with BCMSvu.

Has anyone tried this, or knows of some other way supervisors could see the BCMSvu data on a wireless PDA? They didnt want to lug around laptops all day, so the PDA option is the only wireless option we can think of.

Thanks again for all the input guys/gals!

Pbxman
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Hi there,

We have a kind of similar set up here.  We have a 650 seat call centre, rectangular in shape with a main sales floor on the ground and an upper floor with an centre atrium looking down onto the main floor below.

We have 8 large 50inch plasma screen TVs (very large!) positioned on the wall at each corner of both floors.

We have a PC running CentreVu supervisor and during the busy periods we put a graphical queue dislay on the screens to create a sense of urgency among the agents and give visible info about queues on all the key skills.

From what you say I think that the only way forward for you would be to split the info you need into two categories, queue volumes and agent status.

We tried putting the agent status info on the TVs but to be honest it didnt work because it was too small to read from any distance.  Our Team Leader PCs have the centrevu app installed and they use this to monitor agent activity.  Another key element which we have introduced is that we have a CMS control desk which is always manned and their job is to watch CMS and call agents to challenge why they are on after call or any other aux state.  They also alert designated TLs in each business area using DECT phones which allow the TLs still to be able to walk but CMS control alert them to any problems or excessive queues.

Another way you could possibly do it would be to use a restricted terminal emulation to allow agents and possibly even TLs via PDAs to be able to get a real time window displaying a machine running the necessary reports.

If you used BCMS on a terminal server, you could have a large amount of connections feeding into one box, all displaying their own version of the app.

I hope these bits of info are helpful!

Please let me know if I can be of any further help.

John

We have tried to get CMS Supervisor to run in a terminal server/citrix environment, but ran into many problems.  When we called Avaya, they told us that it would not work, and they do not support it anyway.  I'm not sure if BCMS will install on a terminal server.

We started looking for other solutions for wallboards, and are currently evaluating Symon Communications MySymon (www.symon.com) and Target Vision.  Both are server based solutions that interface with the ACD and then communicate to wallboards / tvs / web servers with call statistic information.  Symon looks the best to me so far.  The communication to the wallboards from the server is all IP, so no serial communication to worry about (ie support.  Remember soldering custom db15 connections? Yuk!)  The price isn't cheap, we'll probably end up spending $20K for a 300 person call center.  

I have done this before but it may not be what you want.  Here is how I had hooked up.

PC had BCMS-Vu (It was really another application, but who cares) and a video card that supported NTSC output. I ran the output of the PC video card into a cable TV distribution amplifer.  I had a fairly fancy one.  I had 4 "internal" tv channels, Agent stats, company messages, inbound billing, collection etc.  I could select what channel would be output to the TV's on the amp.  I had 4 amps and sent out channels 2, 3, 4, and 5.  From the output of the amp I ran RG6AU coax to all the TV's in the building. I had approximately 30 TV's so the amp's I had to use were not low end, apprx $ 900.00 per amp as I recall. User could turn to the specific channel they needed for their needs.

 Depending on the number of TV's you want, a lower cost solution could be this.

PC with scan converter connected.  I would NOT buy a low end scan converter, support for 1024 X 768 would be preffered.  Any lower and the resolution would be poor to the monitors.  Any way I digress, Take the coax output of the scan converter and run it to a Radio Shack cable booster ($20.00).  Run the output of the booster to you TV's and you have yourself a handy dandy system.  I would only use RG6AU coax for best performance.   Hope this helped.

Chris

I can see where you are going and we use the same system i.e., sacn converters to distribute teletext server pages on the TVs mentioned before, but there is still the problem of actually getting the detail needed in a brightly lit environment, to be able to see the info.

Our centre is really big though, you would struggle to make out people from one end to the other, maybe you are working in a smaller place?

With regards to the terminal server side, you could use a basic PC just running CMS and install a more simple Terminal emulation on it such as WinVNC?  Set the emulation to read only and you'd be sorted.  Maybe?

Great info guys - thanks a lot! Im really interested in something clausen said about having 4 internal channels each with different info. This would be perfect for us.

We are going to go with a 2-TV setup (about 40 agents in this room of our call center)..TV on each end of the call center. We only have BCMSvu to use, so i hope its enough to do that.

I have 2 PC's each with geForce MX400 videocards with NTSC S-Video out that can be used for this project. I would technically like to have a channel for each window of our ACD groups..it so happens that we have 4 ACD groups in this part of the call center. If i could even get 2 channels to work, it would free-up that much more space on screen. Currently, all we can do is use 800x600 resolution to display 2 ACD groups on a 27-inch TV. Management is actually satisfied with this - but i think it looks horrible..;) I know it can be done better.

Clausen - where can I get this scan converter? Is that similar to a line-doubler, or basically a device that increases resolution? If i cant get the multiple channels working (im still not sure how i could do that), i'd at least like to increase the TV resolution from 800x600 out of my videocard to 1024x768.

You guy's are awesome - thanks again for any help!

Pbxman
Systems Administrator

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For the different channels, we have 4 teletext servers which run through a KVM switch (which helped keep the cost down) and there are 4 scan converters fitted to the back of the KVM.
This then gets fed through a video matrix which means we can connect any output to any or all of the TVs.  Means we can have the Text on one screen, and CMS one another etc.

Glad this was of some help!

Cheers

John

We purchased a couple of portable scan converters from Blackbox (www.blackbox.com) for our sales force to use.  They do up to 1200 x 1600 and I think cost about $1400 each.  I just ordered them, I didn't have to pay for them, so I didn't check the price.    I will say that Blackbox is expensive but their stuff is really good. The cable TV distribution amp I know absolutely nothing about, but Blackbox might have those too.

Don't you hate it when you cobble something together and management actually likes it, but you spend three months on something and they take one look at it and hate it?


  -- Charles