Enterprise mobility is the simplest step toward digital transformation

Digital transformation, by definition, is the application of digital technologies to processes, products, and assets to improve efficiency, enhance customer value, manage risk, and uncover new monetization opportunities. Here the digital technologies would include but not limited to smartphones, connected devices, smart appliances, wearables, cloud-native apps, big data, artificial intelligence, etc.

Though it’s an industry-wide phenomenon, digital transformation is different for different industries. For our retail customer, most impacts were generated from digitalizing order management, sales automation, and through consumer mobile app because they are sales driven organization. While customers like Caterpillar, Tata steel, Ultratech from asset-heavy industries got better ROI through remote monitoring, equipment diagnostics and advanced analytics solutions of mission-critical equipment.

Even though the digital transformation is different for different industries, enterprise mobility as its subcategory is simple, specific and most effective in digitalizing business operations. Enterprise mobility combined with a modern enterprise software architecture is easy to implement and has the most impact in transforming business.

Field service technicians present one of the strongest use cases for enterprise mobility. They visit multiple facilities at the customer’s location to work on their company’s equipment. Our FSA mobile app provides detailed information on the maintenance history and details on what steps were successful in resolving a problem experienced on the machine in the past before the technician starts regular maintenance or repairs on equipment. If a part needs to be replaced, our custom-built mobile app provides information on spare part availability and allows the technician to request or order spare parts on a mobile device — all in real time. The mobile app also streamlined field job allocation process based on parameters like availability of service technician, pay rate, utilization and distance from the job location.

Without mobile, field service technicians who can’t access their laptop or desktop at the client’s facility cannot record work until long after it is completed. This often means, work is seldom recorded and if recorded later, it’s not detailed and descriptive. This is a major cause of regulatory and financial problems for companies performing maintenance work on mission-critical and expensive assets. For companies performing field service work, it means they are performing work but cannot invoice a customer because they lack supporting documentation.

Enterprise mobility is the easiest manifestation of digital transformation in industrial settings. When employees use enterprise software from their mobile device, it indicates that technology is at the core of the company’s business strategy. Even before taking into consideration the more transformational approaches to business that mobility can enable, employees need to be able to connect to the core business processes and participate even though they are not sitting at their desks. If an organization can’t empower employees with mobility, chances are it will struggle with anything in digital transformation.

How Invasystems can help your company in making the most of its mobile devices:

1. Facilitating near real-time inclusion in business processes requiring supervision.
2. Taking advantage of camera and geolocation features in a phone to deliver powerful and robust field service management functionality.
3. Increasing the amount of data making recorded into an enterprise application.
4. Driving accurate and real-time collection of enterprise information for more efficient operation and executive decision support.
5. Improving the end customer experience in field service environments.
6. Improving the volume and quality of information available to technicians servicing assets or customers, delivering more efficient service, more first-time-fixes in field service environments, more reliable troubleshooting and less downtime in a plant environment.
7. Increasing user engagement with software systems and in turn, increasing the return on investment for enterprise software.