Is Your Business Transparent?

Posted on 21 September 2010

The broad capability of today’s mobile devices enable organisations to conduct their business in a transparent manner, reassuring their customers that they aren’t being over charged. This allows them to beat their competition by demonstrating that they meet SLAs, whilst simultaneously maintaining visibility of their workforce’s activities.

For commercial companies, using PDAs or rugged mobile devices for email, text messaging, CRM, or ‘mission critical’ applications has transformed how their mobile workforce interacts with head office. Examples of these ‘mission critical’ applications could be; recording how much poisonous bait is left in traps by pest control operatives or how much peroxide was delivered to each hairdressing salon. These are just two examples amongst many other track and trace solutions to everyday commercial data capture needs. All these applications seek to facilitate the process of proving your employee did the job they were asked to do.

Your customer signs on glass to accept the work/delivery/service or provision was completed to his satisfaction. The signature is automatically date and time stamped and significantly reduces the possibility of querying the resulting invoice. After all, he or she signed for it!

Over the past five years, advances in hardware have also added to the benefits which transparency has achieved. The addition of a camera has made it possible to capture images of damaged goods, either received or sent, to take a picture of the front door when a delivery cannot be made because the recipient is out or to show where an item was left, capturing the visible condition of plant machinery returned on completion of the hire period or the locked site gates which prevented collection when due.

Also, later additions of a GPS chip set enabled devices to automatically Geotag (record the latitude and longitude) where the image was taken. This GPS capability has enabled organisations to better protect lone workers in the field by automatically tracking their location and allows them to report back any adverse condition they find themselves in. This has simultaneously opened up the transparency not only for organisations to their customers, but also the transparency of workers in the field to their management teams back at base.

Mobile communication is ubiquitous according to our cellular service providers, but in reality we all know there are black spots where service isn’t available. The best mobile solutions cater for the intermittent nature of the cellular network, leaving the user blissfully unaware of any problem because it’s dealt with automatically.

All this hardware has enabled software companies like Codegate to create innovative and ground breaking solutions to meet the challenges of the mobile market, helping companies to operate transparently and prove they’re meeting their customers’ SLAs. Do you think transparency is important in business? Maybe you believe transparency is a risk not worth taking, or that being ‘that’ big brother shows a lack of trust in your workforce?

I’d love to hear your take on this…