A Visionary Approach to Mobility

Enterprise Mobility frequently refers to the delivery of corporate email to knowledge workers’ devices e.g. iPhone or Blackberry. A strategic approach to the mobile enterprise goes way beyond email... It’s about gathering historical, real-time and predictive business intelligence to mobilize key processes; supporting an organization’s evolution and growth.

“A lifecycle approach to mobility is visionary. Built upon an enterprise-grade management platform it will ensure that – no matter what phase a mobile project is at... an enterprise can and should manage and sustain growth in incremental steps”

With a strategic alignment to business goals, mobility can be the vehicle to growth. As mobility grows in acceptance, the number of mobile workers engaged in mission-critical tasks increases and maximum productivity levels are mandatory. Devices are required to run several applications and be used for multiple purposes.

As the following case study illustrates, a lifecycle approach to mobility is visionary. Built upon an enterprise-grade management platform it will ensure that - no matter what phase a mobile project is at - planning and selection, deployment, management, measurement and analysis or optimization - an enterprise can and should gather sufficient mobile business intelligence to manage and sustain growth in incremental steps. Consequently, it will not only be able to run its business more productively, but grow and ultimately transform it through a cycle of continuous improvement.

B2M Solutions cites the 'Enterprise Company' as an example. The Enterprise Company maintains and services central heating boilers and wanted to roll out a mobile project to its 5000 global service engineers. Previously they used mobile phones and paperwork to report on job status, stock checking and the ordering of spare parts. The project goals were to:

• Roll out the project within six months
• Increase worker productivity by 50%
• Deliver a return-on-investment within six months

The issues

The Enterprise Company's first attempt to mobilize was fatally flawed. They purchased 5000 devices from a leading manufacturer and selected a network provider based on price. They successfully deployed a pilot of 200 devices with email so then rolled out a scheduling application, only to discover customizations were needed. The operations department manually configured and tested 100 devices with a second application, but found it took too long and was prone to errors. This was compounded by feedback from field service engineers, who said that the scheduling application was too difficult to use. Devices crashed regularly and the keys were considered to be too small. Many devices were returned to base, thought to be faulty, but few faults were actually found.

A bug was found in the second application, so an upgrade was delivered but could only be applied to new devices - consequently helpdesk workers were unaware of which application version was running. The volume of helpdesk calls increased, workers reverted to a paper process and another member of the helpdesk team had to be recruited.

Some weeks later, a major application defect was discovered and all devices were returned to base for upgrading at considerable cost.

Consequences:

• The deployment went way over schedule
• Worker productivity did not increase
• ROI was not returned within 6 months

The Solution

The project was eventually shelved and an inquest was held into what went wrong. Nevertheless, the Enterprise Company still recognized that to be competitive they had to streamline operations. This time they realized that all aspects of the mobile estate - networks, applications, drivers, configuration settings and users - needed to be properly managed on an ongoing basis. Consequently, the B2M mprodigy® management platform was selected.

To begin the new mobility project, the company identified the processes it wished to streamline; these included inventory checking and ordering, job scheduling and proof of servicing. It also took a strategic view and considered new services it wanted to introduce over a five year timeframe to generate new revenue streams.

On B2M's advice, a pilot was undertaken to 90 workers. This incorporated three possible mobile device types from three leading manufacturers and two different applications. A user questionnaire, combined with analytics collected from the field, found one device type to be the most popular based on its form-factor and operational performance. It also highlighted that users would have to go through a steep learning curve if more than one application was introduced at a time.

The trial ran for six months and during that time the state of the devices was tracked together with all helpdesk incidents. All information about SIM cards, drivers and battery performance was logged centrally. The Enterprise Company designed and implemented the appropriate architecture and the IT department staged a rollout to the full population of 5,000. It did this to coincide with out-of-working hours and to take account of multiple time zones across the company's Worldwide operation.

The Benefits

By the end of this second generation of the mobile project, the Enterprise Company began to realize tangible benefits. New processes and KPIs were consequently established and accepted. Productivity increased by 50%; the headcount required for support tasks reduced by 20%; 40% more devices had multiple usage; while customer satisfaction had increased from 45% to 75% in the 'excellent' category.

Continuous Improvement

The Enterprise Company knew it would only be a matter of time before it would lose its competitive advantage. To engage in further continuous improvements it needed reliable business intelligence. Thanks to mprodigy it began to analyze a wealth of data from the field engineers' devices.

The Enterprise Company consequently embarked on a business process reengineering exercise. Using customized reports that analyzed workflows of engineers, it instigated a change management program with the key objective - to reduce the steps in the workflow when spare parts were needed to complete the job order, so improving efficiency by a further 10%.

To further optimize its operations, site comparisons were made and new benchmarks established, based upon the working practices of the better-performing sites. The ongoing training needs of individual operatives were identified and new service level agreements established. 24/7 service levels were introduced with the net result that the company succeeded in transforming its business. It was nevertheless already looking forward to the next phase in the mobile lifecycle and began to analyze ways in which it could further expand its customer base and build new markets.

None of this would have been possible without the mprodigy management platform and an approach - based on mobile business intelligence - that provided for continuous improvement in the mobile lifecycle - www.b2m-solutions.com.

b2m-solutions.com/lifecycle

This article was first published in Business Management magazine: www.busmanagement.com/article/A-visionary-approach-to-mobility.