Mobile improves efficiency and work-life balance.
Five case studies from Computing (19 May 2005):
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British Gas home services have been through three generations of mobile solutions and in that time have moved from handling 4.3 jobs per day per engineer to over 8. Having data entered at the site and access to local information has lead to "huge reductions in error rates and vast improvements in data processing speeds". Peter Ransom, business systems manager says: "There's no killer application for mobile workers. You get low-level benefits, but there are lots of them and they all ad up, so you need to develop multiple strategies that all come together".
Inchcape Automotive, a fleet management company, have three mobile solutions: PDAs were introduced to 160 car transporter drivers to collect signatures; their home-based 'Inspect and collect' staff are sent job information at the start of each day, and the devices guide the staff through inspection; and compound workers have PDAs for stocktaking. "It's all about improving the efficiencies of moving huge numbers of vehicles around -- because small improvements in the supply change have a massive impact".
ANC, an express delivery company, improved tracking, wireless label printing and label scanning for the 150,000 parcels they process each day. The organization is now more efficient, and can provide a web site for tracking. "That's had significant customer satisfaction benefits and you can't put a price on that", says Henry Rusch, IT director. The introduction mobile technology is not without problems: in an industrial setting the phone signal could interfere with machinery.
Law firm Ashurst issued BlackBerry devices to their partners. "The devices became valuable right away because partners could keep up to date without having to carry a heavy laptop around [...] They are much easier to use on trains or in meetings -- important particularly if an employee is working on a deal where information always has to be up to date". Ashurst have experienced cost savings (BlackBerrys cost less than laptops) and time savings (configuration is easier).
McAllisters Recovery, a vehicle rescue company, has used GPRS-based mobile incident reporting to cut job processing time from 6 minutes to 16 seconds. Like Gritish Gas, they have seen an increase in the number of jobs per day (from 7 to 12). General manager Mark McAllister said: "Before, at peak times, it was chaotic and very inefficient. We had to have about 12 staff working in the command and control centre, but that's now down to four -- and the planning and dispatching role is much less stressful because everything's well planned out".
