QIK
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QIK - (Qantas Intelligent Keypad) is an intelligent airline agent application first developed in the late 1980's to front end mainframe reservation (RES) and (DCS) Departure Control Systems.
QIK was designed & developed by Qantas Airways as a productivity tool for use in the airline's reservation call centres. The Q.I.K. acronym as derived from its use of a separate keypad attached to the keyboard. The keys on the keypad acted as function keys. In later versions the physical keyboard was disposed of and replaced with a logical keypad represented as a quadrant on the user's screen mapped to standard QWERTY keyboard (F1-F12) function keys.
Marketed under the brands QIK, QIK-RES & QIK-CHEK these applications encapsulate airline business rules in a PC based smart application and send the required transactions to the airline mainframe or host for processing. In doing the training time for an airline agent could be reduced from 6 weeks down to 2 weeks. In addition the automation of host transactions eliminated format entry errors. This reduced the need to resend transactions and led to a reduction in mainframe usage costs for airlines.
In the early 1990's Qantas formed a joint venture operation with DMR Consulting to market QIK and other transportation IT solutions under the name of Qadrant International. Qadrant went on to develop later versions of QIK in conjunction with Sabre Decision Technologies (SDT), an AMR/American Airlines subsidiary. This joint development exercise expanded QIK from the DOS platform to the OS/2 & Windows platforms and was brought to market as QIK-II. This collaboration continued and QIK-II was migrated to the SITA's Common Use Airport platform CUTE/OS.
QIK-CHEK & QIK-RES are also sold as part of the TurboSabre suite by Sabre Systems. QIK applications are used by airlines, travel agencies and in airports worldwide.
