In the last month I have spoken to several of our customers about their motivations for mobilizing their business processes for use on handheld PDAs. I was very intrigued that several of them identified their primary motivation was closing new business.
At MobileDataforce we are very focused on helping our customers identify the cost savings that can be achieved by mobilizing business processes on handhelds like:
- Work Order Dispatch
- Inspections
- Asset Tracking
- Delivery services
- Clinical trials data collection
- etc.
However, sometimes this can blind us to the fact that the primary motivations of some of our customers are to close new business by mobilizing, rather than achieving cost savings by mobilizing.
Two of the custom mobile software projects my teams are working on today were initiated because our customers wanted to achieve a competitive advantage in their business. They were not motivated primarily by cost savings due to business process efficiencies. They wanted to show their sales prospects a better way of conducting business using handheld computers, mobile software applications and wireless synchronization with their office database applications. In both cases it worked. Their end user customers chose them over competing companies that were still using inefficient paper, clipboards and fax machines.
I wrote an article called the 28 Reasons to Mobilize which can be downloaded here, but in this article I failed to list as a motivation - closing new business. Yes mobilizing your business prcesses to run on handheld PDAs can save money through efficiencies, but it can also add top line revenue to your business.
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