Enterprise mobility is not a new concept— most businesses have been running
some sort of mobilized business processes for years now. The most established
ones are typically found in warehouses or logistics departments such as shippers
and receivers on the docks quickly scanning materials in and out of inventory.
Early innovators proved the value of mobile solutions, yielding benefits in cost
savings, customer satisfaction, supply chain flexibility, and even revenue
generation. But these early adopters also shared some challenges.
Enterprises deploying at the dawn of enterprise mobility had to become
experts themselves to get a mobile solution up and running. The scenarios
deployed were all custom-built and custom-maintained (think of UPS drivers with
their custom mobile tablets). The costs to deploy a solution were high. Today,
the mobile space has changed considerably. For some functions, market adoption
is so great that mobile capabilities are a competitive necessity rather than a
competitive edge. This pervasiveness brings opportunities for standard mobility
solution offerings, wider reach, and reduced costs of deployment. In other
words, it's no longer inevitable that implementing a mobile solution will
require in-house expertise or deployment resources that normally accompany a
one-off solution. Standard solutions, with minimal customization, can achieve
the same goals with lower costs when it comes to deployment and long-term
maintenance. This article offers a framework for evaluating your mobile solution
needs, and highlights a practical approach to enterprise mobility for ERP.
Customers can leverage their existing ERP infrastructure, lower integration
costs, and still meet very specific mobile technology goals.
Considering the Three Types of Mobile Solutions
Many companies make the mistake of taking a reactive approach to new mobile
requirements as they see a need. For example, the service management line of
business manager needs to enable all his service engineers with a mobile
solution to replace their outdated paper processes and increase the
organization's employee utilization, so they choose and deploy one of many
mobile enterprise solutions. But if every new mobile scenario requires a custom
solution, your enterprise is facing some big infrastructure and maintenance
headaches. Without understanding the complete picture, you could implement a
mobile solution that cannot easily extend to meet the enterprise mobility needs
of your entire organization. This could be a costly mistake if, for example, you
were to have multiple middleware servers each supporting their own custom mobile
solution.
A more strategic view of mobile solutions looks for common elements across a
mobile solution set, which you could leverage for your industry or for employees
in a particular user group. With this approach, you would consider the category
of mobile functionality:
- Functional mobile solutions, for tasks shared by a specific group
of users: These include solutions for a particular team of users,
such as salespeople or service
teams out in the field. - Horizontal mobile solutions, for more general uses across a
company: These include expense reporting solutions such as time or
travel management, or “casual use” scenarios such as key performance
indicator reporting, or the ability to approve workflows on the fly. - Industry mobile solutions, for a specific industry: Some
industries today require mobility for employees to do their jobs.
Manufacturers in the consumer package goods (CPG) industry, for example,
might require a mobile direct store delivery solution so that they can
deliver products on demand directly to retail stores, priced accordingly and
based on actual onsite consumption, in real time. - Functional scenarios attend to the needs of a particular group of
users across industries but with a common function, and they frequently are
among the most mission-critical tasks. Here, a single scenario can cover a
lot of ground. For example, the typical mobile service scenario
encompasses internal and external customer service and plant maintenance,
but could support a variety of users, including sales representatives,
service representatives, internal field engineers, and external service
professionals - Horizontal mobile scenarios usually serve a common business need
that is felt across a wide range of roles and that can apply to almost any
enterprise. An example is time and travel management, which aims to
significantly reduce organizations' travel expenditures through
implementation of an electronic travel policy. When this solution is used in
an industry such as professional services, it can also ensure faster billing
cycles, reduced errors, and quicker turnaround of expense claims. - Industry mobile solutions can be considered “killer”
applications within their respective industries.
For example, the pharmaceutical industry sales force has some
unique needs: Sales representatives maintain an electronic inventory of the
drug samples they provide to medical practices and institutions. Upon
delivery, sales representatives must capture a signature. A mobile solution
customized for this industry enables all this to occur electronically.
But How to Apply?
You can start by evaluating your ERP mobility requirements based on three key
questions:
Do I need mobile functionality that is purely industry-focused?
Do I need a mobile solution that is role-focused, and if so, how many user
roles might my organization want to deploy?
Are there common elements across a horizontal or functional solution that
would apply to my industry?
Your answers to these questions should assist you in avoiding unnecessary
complexity and duplication in your ERP mobility strategy. For decades, ERP
vendors have been empowering businesses of all sizes with a family of adaptive
business solutions, providing best-of-breed functionality built for complete
integration, industry-specific functionality, unlimited scalability, and easy
collaboration over the Internet.
The mobile marketplace has come a long way, and while it can be a challenging
space, it can yield great benefits. Armed with the understanding of your
opportunities and pitfalls when it comes to custom-built and customized
solutions, you can make an informed decision about how and when standard
solutions can suit your enterprise mobility needs.
Ravi Subramanyam, CEO, MobileOne
mail@dqindia.com