Industrial machinery and components (IM&C) companies have always had a highly mobile workforce, especially in sales and field service departments. As markets for IM&C companies have globalized, bringing with it increasing competition from emerging and established market players, mobility is becoming a strategic enabler for manufacturers to provide greater responsiveness and a superior customer experience. Mobility can accelerate sales, operations, and profitability anywhere, anytime. It can help increase the sales pipeline and help close business faster while providing immediate awareness of relevant customer information and improving decision making.
This blog introduces a whitepaper (link at bottom) describing the strategy to drive mobility for industrial manufacturers.
IM&C companies can increase service performance by providing service technicians with access to up-to-date information on customers, contracts, equipment, and work orders at the point of work, dramatically reducing invoice cycle time through the accurate collection of data by field workers. By providing the most current information at the point of decision making, mobility offers greater visibility into the supply chain and supports collaboration internally and externally, resulting in better supply chain planning, greater efficiency, and improved responsiveness.
Mobility enables employees to document and track quality issues where and when they occur. It provides decision makers with the latest updates on production planning and status, as well as inventory availability, independent of location and access method. Mobility promotes fast, informed, and timely decision making by providing up-to-date financial and operational key performance indicators (KPIs) and data visualizations as well as interactive drill-down functionality to support real-time data access.
Always on the go, sales, field service, manufacturing, and supply chain employees and executives seem to spend more time working from client sites, hotel rooms, airports, and remote customer, partner, and manufacturing sites than from the office. As early adopters of mobility, these constituents in IM&C companies are often, by necessity, well ahead of organized corporate mobility programs and frequently encounter both the advantages and the roadblocks associated with mobile device use in an enterprise environment.
Enterprise mobility continues to gain momentum. This is evidenced by increased corporate support for a broad array of smartphones and other mobile devices; expanding support of mobile applications for employees, customers, and partners; and increased access to mobile solutions. Across a range of enterprises, mobility is no longer a “nice to have” benefit. It is now considered a strategic necessity – one that increases productivity and allows firms to offer the latest and most desired technological advances to current employees and potential new hires.
Even though it is becoming a strategic necessity across the globe, making a workforce mobile – and securely connecting business information – with a vast array of mobile devices can be challenging. This paper details the trends and issues behind enterprise mobility and then outlines a framework that can help guide IM&C companies seeking to connect, consume, control, and create a comprehensive and effective mobile strategy. The paper concludes by identifying business processes that, once mobile, can drive the most value to your business.
http://download.sap.com/download.epd?context=E1C75ACD79975441FAFF9B36D7483E89E933B576D78FC70337C02F1...
