MobileFrame Blog » MEAP

Separating Fact from Fiction: Digital Forms vs. Mobile Business Applications

Patricia Oswalt — Tue, 10 May 2011 14:46:27 +0000

Along with the smartphone boom of the past decade we have also seen an exponential increase in the number of companies providing mobile applications.

This increase in the number of available software vendors has caused confusion in the marketplace when trying to determine what the main differences are between companies that provide simple mobile forms vs. mobile business applications.

When most companies are investigating solutions they are looking for ways to eliminate the manual process of collecting information on paper. By eliminating the collection of data on paper, the business will be able to save costs, and ultimately increase profits. As an example let us assume that you are currently looking for a mobile software vendor to help eliminate paper from your field operations. You have completed your preliminary research and think you have found 2 companies that could be a potential fit.

The 2 companies you have found offer different solutions; one provides simple mobile forms and the other provides mobile business applications

Company A – Provides a mobile forms tool which enables you to re-create simple paper forms on a smartphone. This tool makes it easy to collect simple text based information using your smartphone when connected to the Internet.
MobileFrame – Provides a Mobile Business Application tool set which enables you to create, manage, deploy and support an infinite number of mobile business applications. This tool makes it easy to collect not only text based data but also rich data types including photo’s, barcode scans, voice notes, and can operate even when disconnected from the Internet. Meaning all associated business logic, data from your back-office systems is made available at all times even when working in remote locations.

Mobile Forms vs. Mobile Business Applications – What is the difference?

Collecting information using a mobile form is still a one-time event. Information is collected, saved, and transmitted back to the host system. Once completed, someone still needs to physically copy, calculate, or re-purpose the data for your business to receive any benefit.

In other words the means of collecting the information has simply changed formats, but the actual business process that needs to be completed (the one that is taking all of the time) is still manual.

Other common issues with this approach include the lack of the ability to collect data when disconnected from the Internet, control over the data format, scalability, device management, and peripheral support (barcode scans, photos, voice notes, rfid, etc.).

In contrast mobile business applications like the ones developed by MobileFrame, enable you to bi-directionally exchange information between multiple back office business systems (Accounting, Inventory Tracking, CRM, etc.) and the mobile workers in real time. These thick client mobile business applications embed all of the business logic, and necessary data into the database so the mobile worker is able to do their work without having to worry about connecting to the Internet. Mobile business applications also provide peripheral support making it possible to collect rich data types, and validating the data as it is being entered into the system. The best part is that once data is received by the back-office system, automated tasks can be set up to automatically process the data once it is received in real time.

Why selecting a Mobile Business Applications is the right decision:

Using a Mobile Business Application you are not only eliminating paper you are eliminating the administrative overhead, and manual data processing of information back at the office. Information is collected digitally, validated at the point of entry, and automatically entered into the other systems immediately once data is received back on the server. This means that your business will be able to run smoother, faster, and less expensively than ever before possible.

As takeaway from this article here are the 3 differences between mobile forms, and mobile business applications that you should remember.

Mobile Business Applications Provide Control
- Do you want an open, free text entry or do you want to ensure that the information has a level of control to it? Are phone numbers actually phone numbers or simply a combination of 10 digits? Are your addresses formatted correctly? There is no reason to electronically store information if it is not accurate and you lack control of what is captured. Garbage in – garbage out.
Mobile Business Applications are Integrated
- As you are fulfilling customer orders, you can automatically update your inventory tracking system, produce a mobile invoice, send it to your accounting program and update your CRM system in real-time with no additional effort. When your systems are talking to each other it saves you the time of duplicate (or triplicate) data entry.
Mobile Business Applications can run automatically
- Possibly the most powerful benefit of this type of system is the ability to DO something automatically as information is received. Your workflow can be simplified when it is automated. When you are running low on a particular part, your mobile system can update your ERP which can send an alert to the purchasing department and let them know it’s time to order more. Other additional benefits include leveraging management dashboards, customer self-service portals, and automatic delivery of daily productivity reports.

If you are interested in learning more about our award winning mobile enterprise application platform, please contact us today!

The MobileFrame Application Challenge, Send us your FORMS!!!!

Nick Hession — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:44:07 +0000

Click here to take the MobileFrame Application Challenge, send us your paper forms!!!

Send us your paper forms, we will build a custom application and demo it to you live the very next day!

Missed Opportunities

Nick Hession — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:14:11 +0000

I was talking with one of our international customers today, and asked him a very simple question.

How many vendors did you look into before you decided to move forward with MobileFrame?

His answer, said it all… “I don’t know how many but we looked all over the globe for a mobile platform, and didn’t find what we were looking for until we found MobileFrame.”

That begged the question, why MobileFrame?

His answer was pretty telling. He said that after doing some investigation, all of the other “Code-Free” development environments may have looked easy at first glance but were just smoke and mirrors when it came down to crunch time.

He wanted the ability to create applications for his business and be able to make changes to them without having to pay a vendor at every turn. As our conversation continued he left me with a pretty powerful thought. He said “I have ideas all the time that I can leverage to improve our operations, but If I don’t have a way to implement them quickly, and easily they never happen. This means that we fall behind our competition with every missed opportunity. MobileFrame is the tool that will get us where we want to go…”

If you would like to hear more about how your organization can leverage our Mobile Enterprise Application Platform to deliver the results you require, please contact us today.

Barcode Asset Inspection – Challenge Accepted

Nick Hession — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:41:02 +0000

Here at MobileFrame we are pretty good at solving the problem of paper in the field. In this case we had a customer come to us with a very simple yet, annoying problem.

Here’s the current process:

Write the Barcode from the asset on a sheet of paper
Indicate if it passed or failed inspection
If the asset failed, indicate why

They were having problems with

The wrong asset tag information being captured (Transcription Error)
Forgetting to indicate why the inspection failed
Not turning in required paperwork in a timely fashion
Duplication of data back at the office.

Here is the application that I developed in under 1 hour that was able to address these problems with 100% data accuracy, and real time information sharing. If you would like to learn more about MobileFrame please contact us today.

Rapid Application Development Environments

Nick Hession — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:52:03 +0000

Rapid Application Development Environments

This topic always generates a lot of discussion, so I’m sure this time will be no different. First let’s start with the definition.

Rapid Application Development – refers to a type of software development methodology that involves techniques like iterative development and software prototyping. Essentially it is a development style that favors incremental development with constant feedback from the end user. This development process is repeated until the application has been perfected and meets the needs of the user. Many organizations have found that Rapid Application Development or RAD is a fantastic idea, but is requires advanced tools to make this approach a reality. This is where companies like MobileFrame come into the picture.

In order to “Rapidly Develop Applications” it becomes necessary to provide functionality out of the box, to make the development effort easier.

Some of the things MobileFrame does to make it easier to go mobile include:

Drag and Drop Screen Design – Design your mobile application logic once, and deploy to multiple different Operating Systems
Drag and Drop Print Designer – Create Print layouts in Minutes, and not weeks.
Printer Driver Bundling – Printer Drivers are bundled in, no need to pick a specific printer
Device Driver Auto Recognition – We are plug and play across a wide variety of different devices, and can support mixed device deployments, with no extra effort
User Administration – Users can authenticate against their current usernames / passwords, and IT can lock down the device to keep the network safe
Peripheral Integration – We Support RFID, GPS, Barcode (1d, 2d), Magnetic Stripe Scanning, Photo Capture, Photo Annotation, Drawing, Speech to Text, Digital Signature Capture, Printing, Barcode Printing, plus much more
Backend System Integration – Out of the box hooks into any ODBC or OLEDB compliant data source including (SQL, Oracle, DB2, SAP, Sybase, etc.)
Synchronization Management – Fail proof sync engine, with the ability to prioritize which networks you would like to sync over first
Mobile Device Management – Remote Device Management out in the field, with the ability to take administrative control
Enterprise Application Management – Update Applications, Client Software, and third party applications over the air, no need to collect the device from the field
Multiple Language Support – Create business logic once, deploy to any number of languages. No need to write and support a 2^nd code base
Plus many more.

The Mobile Software Development Market is full of companies that claim to have Rapid Application Development Environments, with easy to use development tools, which can be used to assist organizations to design, develop, and deploy mobile applications. And while I can’t speak for other companies that claim to have easy to use tool sets, I can tell you that at MobileFrame the average project from Design / Scope to Deployment is usually 3-4 weeks, and includes integrations with multiple different back-end systems. With this kind of turnaround many of our customers call our environment a Rapid Deployment toolset, instead of a Rapid Application Development Environment.

In fact, the system is so easy to use that all of our sales reps can show how to build custom mobile applications from scratch, make changes to the application on the fly per the user’s request, deploy them out to the device wirelessly and perform a live integration… all on the very first phone call with a prospect.

So the next time that you are investigating different tools to help you go mobile, don’t just think about Rapid Application Development, think about Rapid Deployment.

If you are interested in seeing how MobileFrame is able to create custom mobile applications with no custom programming required, contact us today.

2010 – A New Year, and a New Direction for the Blog!

Nick Hession — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:39:29 +0000

It’s been a very busy year so far, we are almost into February and we’re getting just getting out our first blog post! Fortunately we have been hard at work planning our content schedule and strategy around the blog for 2010, and have decided to add a new section to the blog specifically focusing on Mobile Education. With all of the competing technologies, platforms, operating systems, carriers, it can be difficult to separate marketing hype from actual fact. Our aim is to focus on one topic every couple of weeks, and try to shed more light on each particular subject.

Not surprisingly for this week we’ve decided to focus on : What a Mobile Computing Platform is, and why it matters (Disclaimer – MobileFrame is a software company that focuses on providing the most highly configurable and easy to use Mobile Enterprise Application Platform, that money can buy)

First and foremost what is a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform?

In its most simple form, a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) is a software based mobile computing strategy for providing organizations the means to deploy multiple different mobile applications on top of the same technology stack. Typically this type of Platform approach provides organizations with the ability to extend the data usually enclosed in multiple different back-end enterprise systems, deploy against multiple different types of operating systems, and connect or “Sync” over a wide variety of different types of communication mechanisms. The platform approach usually involves the ability to scale quickly and easily, with a build once and deploy to a wide variety of different types of devices without the need to actually target a specific device or operating system. This approach when carefully planned lowers overall total cost of ownership, and provides a central management point for all mobile application throughout the enterprise.

Typically there are several components to a mobile computing platform

Development Environment – Provides the ability to create the mobile application screens, and underlying business logic
Synchronization Server – Allows for bi-directional synchronization of data between the back office business systems, and the mobile worker
Consolidated Database – A Database that serves as the central data repository or the pass through to multiple different back end systems, also referred to as a Staging Database.
Client Software - This is software that gets installed onto each mobile client to run the mobile applications, manage the synchronization, as read / write to the local database if applicable

The Typical Problem: ABC Corporation has 3 separate divisions that all would like to implement mobile technologies, each with their own unique needs. When faced with the decision of what to do ABC Corporation must decide if they plan on building or buying their mobile solution, as well as who is going to make the selection of the solution vendor, devices, as well as who is going to manage and support the applications. Unfortunately many organizations allow for each division to separately manage their own solution, leading to a decentralized approach.

This approach leads to some of the following challenges:

Significant development costs
High total cost of ownership
Decentralized management
Hard-coded applications, with the need to re-install whenever changes are made
Developed for use with a single device type, and or operating system
No out of the box integration mechanisms to manage the data
Support related headaches, no centralized management

If ABC Corporation were to take the platform approach, they would gain the following benefits

Rapid application development tools
Code Re-use
Single source toolset
Mobility management (device management, etc.)
Application updates handled wirelessly
Out of the box connectors to multiple different backend systems.
Multiple Device support
Lower total cost of ownership
The ability to make changes and deploy them instantly.

For these reasons and many others, organizations that are interested in going mobile have been looking at Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms, to provide the necessary tools, connectors, and support mechanisms to alleviate many of the common pitfalls of going mobile. If you would like to see a demonstration of how MobileFrame addresses the mobile challenges within the enterprise, please contact us today!

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