Adding Value to Your PDA

Once you have jumped into the world of PDAs and learned how to check your email, contacts, calendar, etc., what can you do with your PDA that can add to the bottom-line of your business? The following list contains some ideas:
  1. Replace paper forms that you use in the field, with electronic forms on your PDA. These can be automatically synchronized with your back-office database applications.
  2. Load your product catalogs to your handheld PDA with price and product attributes
  3. Load work order/service orders onto your PDA so you can fill them out and synchronize remotely.
  4. Develop an inventory update application so you can check inventory levels and update them from the field.
  5. If you are an inspector, or dabble in filling out inspection forms, create electronic versions that automatically load to your database or spreadsheet.
  6. Add a bar code scanner to your PDA so you can scan product barcodes and see inventory levels.
  7. Add GPS to your PDA so you can quickly find your next job site or customer location.
  8. Are you filling out time sheets in the field? If you are a supervisor, you can enter the timesheets of your entire crew and synchronize this information to your office remotely.
  9. Do you need to compute a lot of numbers in the field? Do the results of these numbers change what you should be doing in the field? Create a mobile application that can compute your input data and direct your actions based upon results. We work with a lot of inspection processes where the result of the inspect impacts the next step in the business process.
  10. Print forms while in the field. Once your electronic form or mobile database application in your PDA has data in it, you can print it to a mobile printer. You can look up historic information and print this for your customers as well.
  11. Quality Assurance forms - we have a lot of large companies that send out Quality Assurance auditors to inspect their facilities and processes. You can easily replace these paper processes with mobile applications on your PDA. The value? Quick input of field data so you can immediate analyze the data and implement Q&A improvements.

This list identifies a few of the most common uses for PDAs in the field. All of these applications add value to your PDAs and handheld computers.

MobileDataforce, http://www.mobiledataforce.com provides software solutions for quickly and affordably developing and implementing these kinds of solutions.

No comments:

Featured Post

Leadership Advice from a Futurist - A Reading

Leadership is hard.  So for all the leaders and want-to-be leaders out there, here is some advice that I hope you will find useful. ***...