Enterprise Mobility – Size Does Not Matter

A common myth about enterprise mobility is that it is for the big guys. It is usual for small organizations to ignore it without having even evaluated its business case. This leads to many missed opportunities and dissatisfaction among customers and employees alike. People use mobility in their personal lives, and are now demanding it in their professional lives as well. Organizations that fail to take notice and act on this changing behavior stand to lose their standing among them. Enterprise mobility has many use cases, and most of them are irrespective of the size and vertical in which they operate.

1. Productivity: Simple tasks like email, chat, document sharing and collaboration can be made many times more effective and efficient through mobilization. Teams that can communicate and collaborate on the go are far more productive than the ones who are chained to their desks for doing the same tasks. Most of the times, it is just about a message that needs to be passed along, or an update to be sent, or an approval received. If the user has to stop to find a wireless enabled area and use his / her laptop in order to accomplish these uncomplicated tasks, we have a major efficiency loss. Mobilifying these mundane chores can benefit an organization irrespective of their size.
2. Workload Management: Managing teams that are geographically distributed, or even at different points in the same city is a daunting task if you need to have everyone working through a personal computer. Task assignments, updates, and executions in this model lead to wastage of time, since people need to return to their desks to accomplish their jobs. This is also a deterrent to the work-from-home  model, which is a big cost saver especially for smaller organizations who cannot set up an office in every city they want to operate in. Imagine a start up that wants to sell in 20 states. If they need to rent office space for every one of them, just to seat a sales guy, any hopes for profitability are lost.
3. Field Services: Any organization that has a field operation team needs to track and manage them. They need to be provided with customer information and location while on the road, and the distribution of jobs also depends on the physical location of the resources. It is not exactly elegant trying to manipulate a laptop while driving. Also, the not all field service staff is necessarily high skill candidates. Therefore, it is best to use a medium they are familiar with – their smartphones. Allowing the Field Services teams access to customer data and job queues on their smartphones makes them efficient, and saves the company money they would have spent on personal computers or handhelds.
4. Inventory / Asset Management: Asset Management is a complex process. It includes the cradle to grave lifecycle for all things important to you. This means planning / requesting, ordering, receiving / stocking, building / configuring, deploying, retiring, and disposal of assets are all in there. Even when the Asset Management process is defined, documented and followed, sifting through thousands of records while chained to your desk becomes a challenge. That is where mobility comes into the picture. If you have an Asset Management application on your smartphone or tablet, you can manage your assets on the go, through an intuitive and helpful interface.

These are but a few use cases of mobility which an enterprise of any size can benefit from. Typically, the tangible and intangible benefits of mobility more than justify the cost of mobile application development, and provide a highly positive ROI. That’s the reason companies of all sizes and from different walks of trade are embracing the M-life world over. When will you?