The Real Reasons to Mobilize

Handheld computers are fun, although the CFO is unlikely to approve their purchase unless there are better reasons to purchase. Here are some very real reasons for your consideration:

• Cash management - quickly invoice for work done, invoice accurately and avoid disputes
• Better fuel mileage - dispatch work crews to the closest job, on the right routes and send them out with the right tools and supplies the first time.
• Improved productivity - avoid wasted driving time, and inefficient paper work
• Improved customer service - respond faster, bring the right tools and parts the first time
• Visibility into inventory use - monitor parts and inventory used and apply these to the right customer accounts. Make sure you aren't losing parts and supplies to theft and loss.
• Reduced liability - accurate documentation of work, wirelessly synchronized with the headquarters database for storage.
• Improve quality and performance - compare times, work productivity, customer satisfaction and profitability of each employee through automated time stamping and handheld work orders synchronized with the central database.

The bottom line, you can do more work, make more money, for less risks and expenses by mobilizing your remote business processes.

Why Mobilize a Field Services Team?

This article contains an interesting reason to mobilize field technicians - better cash management.

For Dave Croteau, manager of customer support for Toshiba America Medical Systems, getting data from his mobile field-service staff in a timely manner was a nagging problem. And the delay was losing the company money.

Croteau oversees customer-service operations for the Tustin, Calif.-based company, which provides service and support for medical imaging equipment, including ultrasound and X-ray machines, to hospitals and labs across the country. His team dispatches one of 400 field service engineers whenever a customer needs help.

Here was Croteau's beef: The engineers were equipped with laptops running Amdocs' Clarify customer relationship management software to enter information about the work they performed. But if they were at a customer's facility, they usually couldn't get a network connection to log in to the Clarify system, and they'd put off the data-entry task. "The average close for a case was running over 13 days," Croteau says, "which coincided with the technical engineers doing their expense cards every two weeks."

That delayed how quickly Toshiba America Medical Systems could get paid, because the billing department can't process invoices until an engineer files a report detailing the work. Plus, Croteau says, the billable hours engineers entered were often only hazy guesses, and it turned out that on average, customers were being undercharged.

So the 2 reasons Mr. Croteau gave for mobilizing - delayed billings, and under charging customers. In other words - bad cash management.

Spending on Mobile Computing on the Rise

This article describes why companies are spending more on mobile computing and what they believe the benefits are:

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1397,1959015,00.asp

Idaho Fish & Game Department Mobilizes

The Idaho Fish and Game Department has just selected MobileDataforce solutions as their mobility platform. They have requirements for numerous handheld inspection forms and different mobile applications. They will use MobileDataforce's PointSync Developer application to create their own custom applications, whenever and where ever they need them. Their development team will visit our classroom in the next couple of weeks to participate in a training class on the ins and outs of mobilizing business applications.

Let me take a moment to point out the value of owning your own development environment like PointSync. Once you purchase a license of PointSync Developer, you can create an unlimited number of mobile applications at no extra charge. You simply purchase licenses for each handheld device that uses the application. So if your organization has the need to mobilize many different business processes, then this would be a good option.

In addition to being able to develop your own mobile applications without coding, you can edit, customize and update your existing applications without waiting for a vendor to respond to your needs. This is the reason MobileDataforce believes in empowering our customers with the ability to control and edit their own applications.

Choosing Your ERP Mobile Client

Companies we are working with often ask me if they should use a mobile software client provided by their ERP or enterprise software vendor, or if they should use MobileDataforce's PointSync. This is a good question to ask and here are some points to consider:

• Often your enterprise software vendor provides a mobile application that is only usable with their specific software. Any other mobile applications would not be supported or possible. This presents an issue - do you really want to maintain different mobile applications for every different enterprise application? I recently worked with an electrical utility that had 7 different applications they wanted to mobilize. They were attracted to PointSync because it could support all of these applications on one platform.
• Do you want to support/maintain multiple mobile software platforms? If you would prefer to get trained on one platform that can support all of your applications with mobile software clients, then PointSync would be a good candidate.
• PointSync is a rapid application developmentment platform, which means you can develop, edit and improve your own code or one of MobileDataforce's partners can help. You are not dependent on a specific application vendor to update your application.
• PointSync can integrate with multiple database applications at the same time. For example - you can tie into inventory, invoicing, work orders, vehicle tracking systems, etc. and have this information all bi-directionally updated to a single handheld application.

In summary - having your own standardized mobility platform, security, synchronization methodology and development environment often gives you a much better value. It enables you to update and edit your own applications, and have the freedom to enhance your own solutions on your timetable, not a vendor's.

MobileDataforce's Many Electrical Utility Applications

One of MobileDataforce's biggest challenges is helping our potential customers recognize and understand what our mobile software solutions can provide. Why is this a challenge? Because we can deliver so many applications for use on handheld computers and PDAs. We have invested over 20 man years into developing a very powerful set of mobile applications development tools called PointSync and the Intercue Mobility Suite. Our challenge is demonstrating all the applications that we can deliver using our mobile software development and inspection applications. The list below contains just a few of the applications we can deliver to the electrical utility industry for use on handheld computers and PDAs:

• Service Orders
• Vehicle Tracking
• Power Plant Inspections
• Meter Repair & Maintenance
• Line Inspections
• Stray Voltage Inspections
• Health and Safety Inspections
• Pipeline Weld Tracking
• Construction Management
• Facilities Managment
• Asset Manager & Mobile Asset Management
• Sub Station Inspections
• GIS and data collection applications
• Padmount transformer inspection
• Manhole inspection
• Pothead inspection
• Vault (Substation) inspections
• Station inspections
• Padmount station inspections
• Pole inspections
• As-built data collection
• Line patrol inspections
• Ground rod inspections
• Underground Splice inspections
• Network secondary transformer inspections
• Underground secondary network inspections
• Customer equipment inspections
• Sub-transmission insulator inspections
• Switching center inspections
• Farm metering inspection
• Quality control of GIS data (QA/QC on exiting plant)

The power of using a mobile software development solution like PointSync, is you can deliver all the applications above using it. Your IT team only needs to learn one mobile software development environment and platform, and support and edit any of the applications above. The alternative would be to buy separate mobile software applications for each of the above areas, each from different vendors, and get trained on each of their different technologies. Of course that is an unrealistic solution that would be impossible to economically justify, support and maintain. Standardizing on a mobile software development platform like MobileDataforce's PointSync provides an IT organization with a low cost, rapid application development environment that is easy to use, maintain and support.

Electrical Pole Inspections & MobileDataforce

My professional services team has been delivering quite a few inspection applications for the electrical utility industry lately. This screen shot depicts a "pole inspection" application used in the State of Missouri. We have delivered several mobile inspection solutions to Sho-me Power. The other day Andy Meyer sent me this quote.

"Sho-Me Power has been extremely happy with the solution and service provided by MobileDataforce. Our line crews are using the new application to do their annual right of way inspection and we are now working with MDF to provide us with an application to help us build out our fiber network. The PointSync s/w is very powerful and flexible, we have not come up with any ideas that can't be implemented." ~~Andy Meyer, GIS Specialist, Sho-Me Power

GIS, Service Orders & In-Vehicle Inventories

Scenario: A service technician needs a widget part to complete his job. He checks the inventory in his van and he is out. He pulls his PDA phone out, enters the part number into a query, and the map on his PDA shows the nearest van that has his part in inventory. He taps on the van icon on the map and the street address appears with the service technician's mobile phone number. He calls and reserves his part, meets the van and completes his job.

Today's announcement of an integration between MobileDataforce's PointSync Suite, and DeLorme's XMap now makes this scenario possible.

Work Order Management, GIS & PDAs

Today we announced an integration of our PointSync (software for developing mobile applications) with DeLorme's XMap software. This allows us to graphically show jobsites, delivery routes and work locations on maps on PDAs and Tablet PCs.

http://www.mobiledataforce.com/news/apr1906.asp

GPS, XMap software and MobileDataforce's Work Order applications for PDAs and Tablet PCs make a very powerful and efficient system for service technicians.

Our first implementation was for a company in the electrical utility industry involved in meter inspection, maintenance and repair.

MobileDataforce & Utilities Solutions

I found the following figures concerning electrical utility IT spending quite interesting. MobileDataforce does significant amounts of work in the utilities industry with customers such as: Alabama Power, Sho-Me Power, Tampa Bay Electric, New York Power Authority, Lynn Edwards, Power & Construction, etc.

Research by the Research & Analysis Division (R&A) of Energy Central - According to R&A Figures, utilities expect to spend up to $1 billion on ERP solutions, nearly $800 million for work management systems and more than $141 million on business intelligence systems during the three-year period beginning in 2006.