Getting mobile - the rules
Steve Reynolds, managing director of TBS Mobility Solutions examines the essential considerations for successful field mobility
Thinking about implementing a field mobility strategy? Then consider these points nand you won't go far wrong, claims Steve Reynolds.
1) The Business Case; Look closely at your business and identify the areas you think would benefit from mobilisation. Then, create model workflows to identify which parts of these processes can be mobilised, use a ‘before and after’ scenario to calculate the impact upon the workflows. When evaluating the return on investment (ROI), start with the paperwork. In almost all cases, removing the cost of processing paper-based forms should give you a tangible ROI to prove your business case.
2) Total Cost of Ownership; Make sure your business case includes all the costs associated with your mobilisation project, this should include costs for the support of your field staff, the management of the devices and updating the applications on the devices from time to time, and of course that all important communications cost.
3) Mobile Communications; Anyone who has used a mobile phone will know that they do not always have a mobile signal to make a call. The same applies to mobile devices and wireless data, therefore when choosing a mobile solution it is imperative that it works equally well without signal as with signal.
4) IT Enterprise connectivity; It’s important to ensure that you pick a field mobility solution that uses industry standard interface technology, such as XML, and has the flexibility to work with all your enterprise systems and the flexibility to grow and change as your business grows and changes.
5) Change Management; Once you have deployed your solution, change will be inevitable, so you need to be able to make ongoing changes over the air to field workers to allow you to react quickly to your customers changing requirements.
6) Diversity; Ensure you choose a solution that is flexible enough to work over a variety of field activities and a variety of enterprise systems, through a single mobile gateway. Language support is also essential for either global or European roll-outs.
7) Security: Ensure that your chosen field mobility solution is flexible enough to work with your existing security policy. If you do not have a mobile device security strategy, ask your field mobility solution provider to provide a suggested strategy based on extending your current security policy.
8) Scope creep: It is very easy to extend the functionality of your field mobility project, this normally results in the project timescales being elongated and solution costs start to spiral out of control. Start with the examination of your field worker processes, identify the areas that would benefit from mobilisation, produce a detailed set of functional requirements.
9) Pilot; One of the most important stages of mobilising your workforce is ‘testing the theory’ - the live environment in which your staff work is vastly different to the office in which your mobile solution has been designed, therefore it is extremely important you test the final solution in a live environment before rolling it out to all of your workforce.
10) Future Proofing; Leave the final mobile device selection until you are ready to go live. As mobile devices change so do their operating systems, so make sure your mobile application is also future proofed and that your supplier as a product road map that includes the support of future devices.