MobileFrame Blog » Best Practices

When Selecting Mobile Solutions, don’t leave any ROI on the Table.

Nick Hession — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:53:23 +0000

When investigating mobile software solutions every organization has to ask themselves the age old question: “Can I find something off the shelf to solve this problem?”

I invite you to consider the merits of evaluating an alternative approach before spending money on a solution.

FACT: Off the shelf mobile software solutions are developed by companies that identify some common problems in a specific market, then build a software solution that addresses some of those needs. This is also called a one size fits all approach.

PROBLEM: Here is where the problem lies; no two organizations even within a specific market operate in exactly the same way. The associated business logic that has made your organization successful can’t be incorporated into a boxed solution intended to fit the masses.

THE POINT: Don’t purchase a ‘one size fits no one’ product since it will provide only some of the needed functionality to your organization. The ability to configure and define how your solution looks, feels, and operates based on your organization’s best practices will provide a much more substantial ROI, and will solve the problem for which it was intended. As a bonus, our custom software solution can also be reconfigured to accommodate changes as business conditions dictate.

MobileFrame’s Configurable Mobile Application allows you to have a custom app with no custom programming required. If you would like to learn more about how we do it, please contact us today. We can show you how other customers in similar positions have made the decision to go with MobileFrame and have realized incredible returns.

Contact Us | Phone: 208.577.6179 | Email: Nhession@MobileFrame.com

What is RFID? What Does an RFID System Look like?

Nick Hession — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:58:54 +0000

RFID or Radio Frequency Identification is a technology that involves the use of a tag that is applied or incorporated into a product or asset to help identify and track the item using Radio Waves. There are many different types of tags and associated readers available on the market today. It’s now common for organizations to not only look for ways to eliminate field based paper processes but to also think past bar-coding as well.

Here is a good example, you employ a team of 100+ Sales representatives that are in charge of doing inventory counts at customer locations (Think big box retailers) and the inventory needs to be 100% be accurate. The current solution involves the process of manually scanning 100′s if not 1000′s of products while at the customer’s site. No matter how diligent you are this can be a time consuming and error prone task. How do you solve the problem? Hire more sales people? Invest in better, faster scanners? Buy your sales reps memberships to the local gym so they can move faster? A great alternative would be to create an RFID based system.

Here is how such a system could operate. First each item would be equipped with an RFID tag. Instead of the sales rep physically scannning each and every piece of merchandise, he or she would now only need to scan the reader toward the merchandise to conduct an inventory count. At this point the rep could automatically create a suggested order quantity and move on to the important part of the job…Closing Business. The advantage of the RFID system is that each rep can now spend less time manually scanning each product to count inventory without worrying about missing anything.

MobileFrame can help your organization deploy RFID technologies out of the box. Altair Eyewear is an example of a customer of ours who is utilizing such a system to conduct inventory counts of their eye glass frames. To learn more about our advanced RFID Capabilities contact us today.

Mobile Device Management – A little thing that makes a BIG difference

Nick Hession — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:06:19 +0000

Mobile Device Management or simply MDM is software that provides the ability to control your organizations’ mobile devices while out in the field. This usually includes functionality like wiping a device’s database, remote application updates and even remote control.

Over the past several years I’ve witnessed many organizations travel down the same path, they focus almost 100% of their energies on incorporating mobile technology into their business, but fail to think about the full lifecycle of the project. This kind of thinking is usually characterized by questions such as:

What should phase 1 include?
What should my workflow look like?
What kinds of reports do we need?

These are all very important questions and should definitely be discussed BUT just thinking about the application itself and not the full lifecycle of the project is a recipe for disaster. Here are a couple of things to think about:

How do I roll out application updates?
Do I need to re-compile the application and have it re-installed for every update?
Will the device need to come back in from the field?
What happens if the user is having a problem with his device?
How can I troubleshoot the device remotely?
How can I control which applications are installed on which devices?
Which user has what device?

These questions and many others need to be answered before you deploy an application to the field. Planning ahead and considering the full lifecycle of your mobile project, as well as partnering with a company that specializes in mobility will ensure a smooth and successful roll out.

For more info about MobileFrame and our MDM capabilities, request an online demo or contact us directly.

Phone: 408.885.1200 Email: Sales@MobileFrame.com