Blueberry has completed a sophisticated, yet intuitive, management system for ChinaONEcall - a company serving the growing number of travellers to China requiring a way of interpreting between English and Mandarin.

ChinaONEcall provides a 24/7 telephone link to professional English & Mandarin speaking staff who can simultaneously interpret spoken conversation from one to the other, allowing travellers to China with limited language skills to remove the formidable obstacle of communicating with taxi drivers, new business contacts, store assistants and so on.

This was a new venture for the company, whose British owners planned to market its concept as 'the interpreter in your pocket' to people with an interest in the booming Chinese economy. Access to the service only requires a mobile phone but can be accessed of course by landline and therefore in the UK or elsewhere before or after the trip to China.

ChinaONEcall contacted Blueberry Consultants as it required a complete system to manage its business processes. In particular, the business required:

• A public website where customers can purchase credit and check their accounts.
• Call centre software which allows operators to provide the phone interpreting service and debit the customer's account accordingly.
• A sophisticated web-based management system which allows maintenance of the system and supports resellers and sales agents.

Blueberry completed the C1C Management System in 6 months using MS ASP.NET and MS SQL Server, with SQL Server replication to keep the public web-site (hosted in Hong Kong) in sync with the main system management server in Kunming, where the call centre staffed with expert English/Chinese interpreters is located.

Replication was an important requirement of the system as account information was needed within minutes by office staff in Kunming, delivered over a network that could experience considerable delays between the two locations.

A significant challenge in setting up replication was to eliminate timeouts due to poor links to China, which would require the initialisation of the databases to be started over.

Blueberry solved this problem by performing a manual initialisation: Rather than allow the Kunming server to be responsible for the creation of the stored procedures to support replication, Blueberry removed them from the initialisation process, instead creating them manually at the Hong Kong server. This reduced the required up-time of the link from several hours to just minutes.

A user-interface to a Nortel telephone system was also provided by Blueberry for the call centre.

Michael Sinclair, Marketing Director of ChinaONEcall, said: "Blueberry has made the management system simple and intuitive to use. A new user simply signs up for a new account through our website or over the telephone before travelling to China. Then it's a matter of calling our interpreting service whenever you need to. This has worked smoothly and our clients are happy with not just what our team provides but the simplicity and reliability of the contact with them day or night."

He went on to say: "This innovative service is aimed at the growing number of travellers to China who cannot even contemplate getting to grips with the incredibly difficult language of Mandarin - offering them simultaneous translation to and from English to Mandarin, but allowing the English speaker (whether English is their native tongue or their second language) to speak comfortably and confidently to any Chinese person as if they were sitting together across the board-room table, in a telephone conference across the globe or in a busy hotel lobby.

"All that's required is a mobile phone – we can even provide a Chinese SIM card and an easy way to 'top up' too by phone or online."