QIK

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QIK - (Qantas Intelligent Keypad) is an intelligent airline agent application first developed in the late 1980s as a front end to mainframe computer reservations systems.

QIK was designed & developed by Qantas Airways^[1] 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,^[1] QIK-RES^[2] & QIK-CHEK^[2] 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 1990s Qantas formed a joint venture operation with DMR Consulting to market QIK and other transportation IT solutions under the name of Qadrant International. In 1997 DMR Consulting purchased the remaining 49%^[3] stock of Qadrant off Qantas Airlines to become the sole owner of the company.^[4] Qadrant went on to develop later versions of QIK in conjunction with Sabre Decision Technologies (SDT),^[5] 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.^[6] QIK applications are used by more than 70 airlines^[7] worldwide.