What should I mobilize first?

What should I mobilize first?

Starting your mobilization initiative

When you mobilize with Unplugged, you can streamline and simplify critical business processes by reducing the time taken to complete critical business tasks. But which processes offer the most potential for productivity gain?  

Good starting points for mobilization are “internal red tape” processes that are slowing down your business. Mobilization can speed up these processes by enabling your workforce to respond quickly to critical issues and requests, without needing to be tied to their desktop PCs or laptops.

Your workforce are already using mobile apps outside the workplace on their own mobile devices. In the emerging Bring Your Own Device world, why not deliver business apps to those very same devices so that your team members can respond anytime, anywhere?

Streamline your approval processes

This type of application is usually the first to be requested to be mobilized and a great example of how mobile apps increase efficiency in the workplace. If a manager can any time and anywhere pull up a list of requests for approval then this speeds up the internal approval process dramatically. Examples of approval processes include expenses approval, time-off, new starters, or purchase orders.   

Using Unplugged on a smartphone or tablet, the information can quickly be reviewed and a decision made, and workflow processes can be triggered directly from the mobile device. Working with the workflow capabilities of the Lotus Domino/IBM XWork platform, you can create customized Unplugged apps to streamline many different types of common approval processes.

 

Streamline data input

Thousands of business processes exist today that require some type of information input from the user. Because Unplugged can store  data directly on the device, any data that is input is guaranteed to get back to the organization even if no wireless network is available at the time of entry. The iPad above is running a Health & Safety Checklist app where choices can be input via drop-down selection boxes and free text entered. This example also shows signature capture functionality which along with GPS support can fulfil corporate audit requirements.

Access reference information faster

Unplugged stores information on the device, so data retrieval is fast and always available. Examples of this type of application can include product catalogs or price lists for remote sales representatives, schematics for technical engineers or policies and procedures for admin and support staff. Using HTML 5 these existing reference applications can be made to look rich and clean, even like a book or magazine, which can be very useful for customer-facing processes and information.

Mobilizing front-line workers

Unplugged apps running on phones and tablet devices help you to automate critical processes in the field. Front-line workers can save time and avoid transcription errors by entering data directly into their Unplugged app on their device. Because Unplugged writes data to a local datastore on the device, it works reliably in locations where the mobile data signal is weak. Using standard Web feed interfaces like SOAP, OData and Atom, it’s a straightforward integration task to synchronize data between Unplugged devices and your line-of-business systems.