Are Smartphones Costing You More Than Just Lost Data?

Posted on 14 May 2010

Yes, of course you comply with the Data Protection Act’s requirements for you to take sensible precautions with all individual’s private information, but what about your mobile workers and their everyday job related transactions?

Did you keep the overall cost of the mobile solution down by using inexpensive smartphone based devices instead cost effective, rugged terminals, after all any solution was better than paper!

Now the system is fully installed you should be reaping your rewards. You’ll hopefully be starting to notice some of the savings you were expecting but, they may be a little less than you initially thought. There may be an alarming number of returned, broken devices, and the time taken to repair/replace them, may come as a shock. The calls from each region in the field asking for an increase in buffer stock units may come as an unbudgeted expense. But the biggest shock may be the cost of recapturing the lost data from these damaged devices.

Those shiny smartphones with the latest Windows Mobile operating system, 3G connectivity, GPS satellite positioning and WiFi network communications were a ‘bargain’ but, they lack an important feature – a battery backup! If they’re dropped, broken, run out of power or are simply worked for too long, they lose memory. Vital system settings and transactions captured during a hard days work, but not yet transmitted back to your host system, may be lost.

To recover critical, confidential information, your team must;

• Get a new device out to your worker
• Collect the old one, remove it’s SIM and send the unit for repair
• Insert the SIM in the replacement device and configure it’s network connection
• Set up any user specific details on the replacement device
• Establish data connection and download/update as required to get your worker operational
• Determine if any transactions are missing and if possible, collect the data again…this is not a luxury easy to come by!

The associated costs are high. To get the new device out to the worker and critically recover any lost data will require a qualified supervisor or super user, taking time out of their role to travel to the distressed worker, which means two people are now unproductive. The supervisor will need to have a spare device available for him to take, implying that you are storing a buffer stock of devices in each region or with each team leader. The number of buffer stock devices required will be determined by your experience of how many units break each week, a lesson which can only be learnt the hard way!

Once on-site, the supervisor will take some time to transfer the SIM or set up the new device with the mobile field workers’ details and to determine what, if anything, has been lost. Jointly they will determine the course of action necessary to restore the device to operational status and complete the tasks the mobile field worker was charged with.

At best, this whole process will stop the worker for half a day, planned calls won’t be completed and customers will need to be contacted advising them of the delay. The supervisor, unless employed purely for this purpose will also have his day rescheduled, losing any planned productivity. If their combined salaries are £40,000 and they’re expected to work 230 days a year, including employers NI contribution, this has cost you £197 plus travelling expenses and courier shipping costs of the broken unit. Additionally, the costs of recovering/rewriting/capturing the lost information must also be considered. Finally, and potentially the biggest cost of all, the cost of a customer loosing confidence in your mobile solution.

So one broken device in the field costs over £200, but what may worry you most is how often they break. One of our customers established a trial of a popular PDA smartphone with 70 users, he cancelled the trial after one month because, on average, over 24 (34%) were in the repair loop.