Mobility and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is transforming the way in which people work and how companies are embracing these new work systems. If we are designing a mobility strategy for our organisation, we should take into account certain essential concepts that will improve how our businesses operate.
There are business sectors in which mobility is part of the organisation’s DNA. We are referring to all those that have field workers attending customers at their homes or corporate facilities. Whether they are sales agents, technical staff, health care personnel, restocking staff, logistics, etc.
A good mobility strategy necessarily requires a transition to digital systems. Insisting on using notebooks and paper forms makes no sense today. More so when our employees already have smartphones that enable them to access their email, management systems, or, in the most basic of scenarios, to be contacted at any time and place.
The current trend toward mobility requires all companies to develop tools and solutions to adapt to the new context.
What are the eight essential elements required to design a corporate Field Service Management mobility strategy?
1. Keep user experience in mind: that means the ability to access applications from any device, smartphone or tablet. They must be able to work immediately, and quickly find what they need, customized according to their role and their needs (let’s not forget, in this regard, outsourced workers when configuring access levels). In other words, we have to reduce the time wasted between tasks.
2. Improve customer satisfaction: by reducing incident resolution times, or giving priority to contracts that include service level agreements.
3. Eliminate any dependence on specific devices: we mean that the information should not physically reside in the device so that if it is damaged or lost, we lose the information stored. In this sense, cloud-based solutions are paving the way; all that is needed is for the user to enter his/her user credentials to access the relevant information.
4. Automate access to information and results: it should not be necessary to pre-load information before leaving the office, and any data that is entered into the mobile device should flow back to the organisation in real time. This is particularly important for certain tasks, such as coordinating work teams, reassigning routes or jobs, or performing analytics and controlling the organisation’s activities. In this sense, we must not forget the increasing role of Big Data for business analytics.
5. Protect confidential information: an important issue, which affects not only the privacy of our customers’ data but also our own corporate information. If you have a solution, in which the data are presented based on user profiles, and these data are stored conveniently in a safe repository (with backup processes), you will be able to control one of the most valuable assets any organisation can have: information.
6. Implement measures of compliance– either with the LOPD (Law on the Protection of Personal Data) that has been in force since the year 2000, the various industry-specific regulations, or when the GDPR comes into force at European level. By May 2018, we shall have to be prepared to apply new requirements regarding privacy, security and transparency in the management of personal data.
7. Choose a good supplier: not only for their knowledge of the industry in which they are operating but also based on their level of innovation and commitment to technology. Mobility is not only an FSM tool, it is also about collaboration, the development of mobile applications, CRM, Business Intelligence, and geolocation. You need a comprehensive perspective to solve current or future needs.
8. Prepare for the IoT universe: corporate mobility is changing dramatically, as is the interaction between devices. Gartner tells us that, by 2020, there will be 21,000 million connected devices. And that by 2022, the Internet of Things will save consumers and businesses one trillion dollars a year in maintenance, services and supplies. They are setting new milestones in predictive maintenance services in contrast to the traditional reactive model thanks to new threshold rules predefined to identify errors and monitor the status and performance of devices.
In the design of our Task4Work solution, which is 100% cloud-based and built entirely on the Google platform, we are already dealing with all these issues to make it the best option to deal successfully with the most ambitious FSM mobility strategies. And our commitment to the technologies we represent places us in a privileged position compared to our competitors.
If you would like to know more about Task4Work or any other of our business mobility solutions and services, please contact us without obligation.