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.
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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. Continue reading →

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?

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