White Paper: A Guide To Field Mobility

Enterprises all over the world have discovered the value of field mobility. With a mobile computer in hand that provides a real-time voice and data connection to the business, field sales and field service workers are more efficient and effective, enabling enterprises to maximize the value/utilization of the field workforce.

Your field workers are responsible for the single-most important interface in your enterprise — the daily interaction with your customers. Whether your workers are involved in sales, service, inspections or asset tracking, the efficiency and effectiveness of this workforce can have a tremendous impact on the health of your business. The level of service that these workers deliver will drive your sales and customer retention levels up — or down. And the productivity levels of these workers will drive your costs up — or down.

Regardless of your industry, when workers in the field lack access to the voice and data networks in the office, the effect can be crippling. Without a real-time connection to back end business applications, workers must utilize paper forms to collect information for a wide variety of transactions — and then later enter the information on those forms into the computer upon return to the office. As a result, time is inserted into your business processes — lag times that reduce service levels, employee productivity, cash flow and overall profitability. The need to touch the data twice increases the opportunity for costly errors that again impact business efficiency. In addition, field workers are forced to phone the office for simple information requests — such as pricing, inventory and invoice information, directions and more — again adding time and cost into your business processes. And if cell phones are utilized to provide a voice connection out in the field, field workers have two phone numbers and two voicemail boxes to manage — and the enterprise must purchase and manage more mobile devices.