In-Truck Hardware

Hi Gang,

Firstly, thank you for having me and I'm hoping I can get some answers to a business problem that our company is having.

We have a dispatching and data management solution that we market across North America and Europe for the automotive towing industry called InTow Manager. As part of our solution, we have a product that dispatches call directly to towing operaters in the truck from the central office. Part of our solution is a 2-way service that we have written to allow drivers to update the dispatch window back at the central office with the status of the service call. It utilizes text messaging to cell phones, pagers, blackberry - whatever the driver has a communication device. The driver can reply to the email with the letter E and it marks them EnRoute, and O for OnScene, an I for InTow etc, etc...

One of the challenges for the company owners is getting the drivers to send the updates back to the dispatch office. Either to complicated, or they don't feel like pulling the cell phone out all day - that kind of goofy stuff.

We are hoping to find a piece of hardware that we can mount in the truck that has a display and will accept a text message or email message and a set of buttons that they can simply press to update the call status. I guess what we are looking for is very SIMPLE solution that doesn't require alot of thinking to operate. Pre-marked buttons that are labeled and can be pushed as driver call status changes.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this?...Or have a clue where we could get something like this manufactured?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated...

Dennis Thurlow
OnScene Solutions
Towing Software from OnScene Solutions - The In Tow Software Suite
519.472.7408
dennis@onscene-solutions.com