2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. GPRS Introduction GPRS Introduction Job Dispatch Nonvoice mobile services can be used to assign and communicate new jobs from office-based staff to mobile field staff. Customers typically telephone a call center whose staff takes the call and categorizes it. Those calls requir- ing a visit by a field sales or service representative can then be escalated to those mobile workers. Job dispatch applications can optionally be combined with vehicle-positioning applications, SO that the nearest available suitable personnel can be deployed to serve a customer. GSM nonvoice services can be used not only to send the job out, but also as a means for the service engi- neer or salesperson to keep the office informed of progress towards meeting the customer's requirement. The remote worker can send in a status mes- sage such as "Job 1234 complete, on my way to 1235." The 160 characters of a short message are sufficient for communicating most delivery addresses such as those needed for a sale, service, or some other job dispatch application such as mobile pizza delivery and courier package delivery. However, the 160 characters require manipulation of the customer data such as the use of abbreviations such as "St" instead of "Street." The 160 characters do not leave much space for giving the field representative any information about the problem that has been reported or the customer profile. The field representative is able to arrive at the cus- tomer premises but is not very well briefed beyond that. This is where GPRS will be beneficial to enable more information to be sent and received more easily. With GPRS, a photograph of the customer and his or her premises could, for example, be sent to the field representative to assist in finding and identifying the customer. As such, we expect job dispatch appli- cations will be an early adopter of GPRS-based communications. Corporate E-mail With up to half of employee