How mobility initiatives are making enterprises better, quicker, faster

"Keep me movin’, movin’, movin’, yeah
Movin’ yeah
Mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile ..."
—"Goin’ mobile," The Who

Little did classic rocker Pete Townshend of The Who fame realize when he wrote and performed this 1970s freewheeling anthem that his words would be so apropos to corporate America circa 2009.

But oh how they are.

From khakis-wearing repairmen to silk-tied executives, workers today are all about goin' mobile and taking their business applications with them. Of course, the mindset has shifted some. Today's mobile aspirations have nothing to do with the live-life-as-it-comes mentality of the '70s "hippie gypsy" crowd. Rather, the mobility impetus comes from the desire to have real-time, instant access to critical information—wherever and whenever it's needed.

This goes well beyond providing remote access to the corporate e-mail system. That's a given. More than half of large organizations have progressed beyond the basics and are into their second-generation mobility efforts, reports research firm Gartner, Inc., in Stamford, Connecticut.

That means service repairmen have smartphone access to inventory and customer data, enabling on-the-spot checks of parts availability and warranty status. Nurses carry mobile devices that help them quickly locate the nearest IV pump for faster patient care. And laptop-toting sales managers can tap into the order-entry system while on the road to get the day's sales figures.

As Burt Kaliski, director of The EMC Innovation Network, says: "There are so many opportunities to be able to interact with the world around us more effectively through mobile computing."

As an example, Kaliski cites the work of Moca, an organization providing mobile healthcare with remote diagnostics. "In parts of the world where there are not many doctors and hospitals but there are trained healthcare workers who can see patients, those workers can measure vital signs and use cell phones to take pictures," says Kaliski. "Mobile computing lets experts around the world access that information and tell the providers how to render appropriate care. That's a significant step forward in an application space beyond what's possible through ordinary use of the Internet."

In any case, mobility-enablement means a better informed, more responsive workforce. Widely reported benefits from goin' mobile include better customer service and improved worker productivity.

Don't touch my wireless

Mobility can carry so much wallop that many business decision-makers are prioritizing such initiatives over other IT endeavors during these gloomy economic times, says Gene Signorini, vice president, Enterprise Applications & Mobile Solutions, at Yankee Group Research, Inc., a Boston-based technology consulting firm. "If you're a business person, the ability to stay in touch and be responsive to your clients is more critical at this point than in the recent past. It's tough to cut back on that," he says, noting that faster order-entry times and shortened billing cycles can be achieved quickly and easily.

At Hologic, Inc., a medical device manufacturer specializing in women's health, cutting back on mobility commitments is nearly unthinkable, says Dave Rudzinsky, senior vice president and CIO at the Bedford, Mass., company. "When the economy recovers, we want to be a bigger, better, stronger, and faster company. As new projects come up, if they're around our sales, service, and field personnel, we certainly look at mobility," he explains.

Hologic has been rolling out mobilized applications across four business units over the last five years, Rudzinsky says. It started small, with a typical, first-time deployment: providing field service engineers with remote access to backend customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from their laptops. Until then, the engineers had relied on phone calls, faxed documentation, and mailed correspondence. In other words, the information flow in and out of the company was far from optimal.

"By getting rid of those manual processes, we realized incredible efficiencies in closing calls faster, ultimately being more effective in servicing the customer and being able to update the backend systems so transactions were timely," Rudzinsky says. Hologic's field service engineers could even work in the CRM and ERP applications when on a plane or otherwise untethered from the Internet, then automatically be synched up with the backend the next time they connected, he adds.

Approximately 1,200 of Hologic's 3,500 employees are now mobility-enabled via their laptops, smartphones, or both, Rudzinsky says. "What I like best about mobility for Hologic is that it eliminates the gaps in processes and allows us to do our core business operations faster. Ultimately, that turns into value for the company and improved service to our customers. Hopefully, in the end, people are finding Hologic a better company because our people can work from wherever they are," he says.

Many corporate initiatives today revolve around enabling mobile access to applications from smartphones. The current generation of devices is more capable of handling business application demands than previous models. Applications are no longer constrained by memory and processing power, and today's smartphones commonly support imaging and video, Global Positioning System (GPS)-based location services, and WiFi connectivity. Availability of high-speed 3G wireless networks from cellular carriers turns application performance into a non-issue for most companies.

Mobile intelligence

The ability to put smart devices in executive hands has led many companies to approach business intelligence (BI) reporting as a next-step mobility initiative. Hologic is no exception. "When I think of major IT initiatives, we are trying to do anything to cut costs and be more efficient, and BI and mobility play a big part of that," Rudzinsky says.

Sales executives who are out in the field with their reps don't want to wait until the end of a quarter to see sales results, for example. "They want to know today how they're doing so they can manage the process better. It's incredibly important for them to get their numbers on sales, shipments, and revenue on a regular basis," adds Rudzinsky.

"In the real-estate business, agents can never have enough market intelligence," says Matt Lavallee, director of technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc. (MLS PIN), the largest multiple-listings service in New England. MLS PIN provides nearly 30,000 agents with Web-based access to a database of more than 60,000 active real-estate listings.

Ideally, real-estate agents are out of the office either getting or showing new listings. They're inherently mobile creatures, and many already have smartphones. "Making MLS PIN databases available from mobile platforms was a necessity," Lavallee says.

Accessing the most-requested information

MLS PIN analyzed what information real-estate agents most need at their fingertips, and its developers worked to create a set of simplified screens and search capabilities adaptable to any one of about 70 different smartphones. For example, agents can search by MLS number, city, or sub-area of Boston. They can pull comparable listings. They can view open house and broker tour information. Results display address, summary report, thumbnail image, plus links to more detailed information.

Providing mobile-device database access hasn't much changed MLS PIN operations. But agents who use the mobile service report closing deals more quickly thanks to the field intelligence. No longer are they fumbling around with phone calls and rebooking appointments, Lavallee says. Since January, MLS PIN has seen fairly consistent use of the mobile browser service, with roughly 300 agents using it daily.

Ultimately, MLS PIN anticipates adding context to these database searches with location information. Although Lavallee doesn't have a target date in mind, he envisions a day when real-estate agents would be able to calculate the distance from a listing to points of interest in and around the city, local schools, subway entrances, and the like.

The context wave

With context awareness, wireless devices such as environmental sensors, radio-frequency identification tags, and smartphones or laptops send location, presence, and other status information across the network. After analyzing the data, specialized platforms send it back over the network to provide context at the end device as needed.

Anthony Marano Company, one of the country's largest produce distributors, recently bolstered its voice-centered mobility initiative with presence information. Voice mobility is critical for this company, whose salespeople are constantly on the phone with suppliers and customers buying and selling fresh fruits and vegetables around the clock. Grocery stores and food service companies throughout Chicago, where the company is headquartered, rely on the salespeople to keep them up to date on the best produce at the best price points.

Anthony Marano relies on a fixed-mobile-convergence network to ensure seamless roaming between its internal WiFi and external cell network as salespeople move in and out of the distribution center, says Chris Nowak, CTO at Anthony Marano. Presence-aware mobility is ratcheting up customer responsiveness for the company's salespeople, each of whom specializes in a particular type of produce. "We've got our tomato, peppers, lettuce, and fruit guys," says Nowak, noting that one department alone does $60 million a year in sales. "These orders don't renew themselves. They're different day to day."

From tomato guy to lettuce guy to pepper guy

The challenge is keeping a buyer on the line as the tomato guy takes his order then transfers the call to the lettuce department, and so on. With fresh produce, time is of the essence, and forcing a buyer to call back in because a salesperson has dropped a call trying to transfer it, or sends someone to an incessantly ringing line, can be irritating to the customer.

In the spring, Anthony Marano upgraded its wireless infrastructure with a presence-aware platform and added a small presence application to its smartphones. Now, at a glance, salespeople can tell which of their colleagues is available—either in the building or hooked into the WiFi network remotely—and are ready to take an order.

"We're driving toward faster and faster response time," Nowak says. "Our interaction with customers is especially critical because we're 80 to 90 percent same-day delivery, we have a product that expires quickly, and our customers only want to buy what they need immediately."

With mobile presence well in hand, Anthony Marano now is looking at how to increase worker productivity in other ways, Nowak says. Allowing salespeople to run simple ERP queries to check delivery status from their smartphones would be a logical next step—and would save people from having to log in to a departmental workstation to get at the same information.

Whether they're selling breast-imaging systems, residential real estate, or navel oranges, today's workers are goin' mobile, and they want their business information to follow them.