Enterprise mobility solutions aren’t like the new fangled gadget you get just to say you have it.
Every mobility solution arises from a mission-critical business need. Each of the solutions we’ll discuss in this chapter is designed to help your organization achieve one or several of the following business goals:
While all the solutions we’ll cover in this chapter get lumped under the umbrella of enterprise mobility, each solution is unique in what it can do for your business. Each solution also requires unique delivery and support to realize its potential. Whether you want to equip your sales force with tablet-based POS systems or attract new customers with a useful app, the following mobile solutions will get you there.
Mobile Commerce
Remember when e-commerce took off in the late nineties with pioneers like Amazon.com leading the way? Now, a popularity explosion at least equal in size to the e-commerce craze is happening with m-commerce, or mobile commerce. M-commerce is simply the purchase and sale of products and services through Internet-enabled mobile devices.
Also known as “next gen” e-commerce, m-commerce offers the appeal of being able to buy just about anything from just about anywhere. Consider these statistics:
On Thanksgiving 2014, 52.11 percent of web traffic and 32.33 percent of sales came from mobile devices. Those numbers are a 22 and 25 percent increase respectively over 2013’s numbers.
Those numbers speak for themselves — an m-commerce application is imperative to your company’s future. Mobile commerce solutions will allow your customers to browse and buy from you through an app, which is another trend you don’t want to miss out on. In 2014, shopping within applications grew by 174 percent, compared to an increase of only 76 percent for app use in general, according to Yahoo’s Flurry Analytics.
What your final m-commerce application will look like will depend on how much customization you want and how complex you want it to be. The important thing with m-commerce solutions, as with all mobile technology, is that you choose an adaptable platform that can evolve with devices and changing trends in commerce.
Mobile Productivity
Allowing your workers to perform their tasks from anywhere around the clock can do wonders for productivity. Imagine one of your teams is putting together a proposal.
Allowing your workers to perform their tasks from anywhere around the clock can do wonders for productivity.
Several members of the team are on the road, but everyone needs to review the document before it’s sent to your client. Rather than having to wait for the traveling team members to boot up their laptops and find an Internet connection, a mobile workforce can immediately review and collaborate on the document through their smartphones.
Sitting on a plane, in a taxi cab, or between meetings, your employees can do what they need to do more quickly and conveniently. Efficiency and flexibility are the goals of mobile productivity solutions. But what exactly do productivity solutions look like? They can take a number of forms, such as:
Common things your employees find useful on their mobile devices might include:
Field Force Management/Enablement
The workforce is increasingly mobile, frequently out of the office for meetings with customers, site visits, and other critical tasks. Unequipped with mobile technology, field workers are limited to checking in with occasional calls or reports. Neither the field worker nor the business has any way of knowing what’s happening in real time. As a result, out of the office usually also means out of touch.
If field employees are a key component of your organization, field force