Personal Tracking vs. Personal Space: Drawing the line

Posted on 23 May 2011 | No responses

Both Google and Apple are being grilled by the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law in the United States, about how they protect data of individual customers, specifically location data. Closer to home a European data protection advisory panel has suggested to the EU that the location information which both platforms capture should fall under the umbrella of “personal data”. This could mean Apple and Google facing tougher location data laws in the revamped Data Protection Directive later this year. This obviously relates to individual’s smartphones, but are work mobiles affected?

Using smartphones (or more commonly within our industry, rugged mobile devices) with integrated GPS chipsets, enables businesses to locate skilled workers and efficiently respond to business demands. Location data is routinely used to determine who’s nearest to an urgent customer call, which engineer is nearest and has the on-board parts and skill to fix a particular machine. In order to fulfill employer’s ‘Duty of Care’ to the employee, it’s essential to know where the lone worker is and when they return from visits. While some mobile solutions turn tracking off out of business hours, some leave it on, is this infringement of the individuals right to privacy or proper corporate traceability?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a 1984 Orwellian, ‘Big Brother’ is watching you society, people must have their privacy and their freedom. But if Europe legislates to restrict how data captured from mobile devices or smartphones, which are owned and issued by employers to employees in order to aid their work or comply with other directives, the baby may be thrown out with the bath water. The enormous business benefits derived from location awareness have only recently begun to be realised, the full potential has yet to be truly achieved.

We all know of some people who aren’t interested in working for the salary they receive and are more likely to disappear off the corporate radar for a game of golf, or become ‘non contactable’ for a two-hour snooze in a layby. Perhaps this is less worrying than the employee regularly visiting a competitor’s site. In either case the employer is justified to question their performance, their suitability to the role and the value of their salary.   Without a mobile tracking solution in place, managers would be ignorant to this information, and the business would continue to suffer as workers take liberties.

Tracking the mobile worker is beneficial to both the employee and the employer. Should an accident or mishap prevent the employee from arriving at a customer site, or prevent them getting home safely, the monitoring system can alert their support team to the problem. This is not only a nice thing to have; this is (in certain cases) a requirement under health and safety legislation. Mobile solutions can provide critical information when used in tracking scenarios, including time, date and location stamping, enabling relevant parties to identify and analyse situations in a concrete and conclusive manner.

Mind you, if I was the employee what I would like to be 100% convinced of, is that the monitoring system stops tracking me out of business hours, because during my personal time it’s my business where I go and nobody else’s.

What do you think, is employee supervision a touchy subject? Have you been confronted by your workforce about their visibility or been accused of not trusting them? Or maybe you’re on the other side, actually being tracked? I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts whatever angle you take…

Feel free to leave a comment below. Or, alternatively if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a mobile solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808.

How Safe Are You at work?

Posted on 4 May 2011 | No responses

Our employers have a duty of care to ensure we are all safe in the work environment. But how do employers keep you safe if you’re working alone and away from the office, or if you come into contact with the public.

I’ve often written about protecting workers ‘in the field’, providing them with remote communications through their mobile computer to summon aid, but what about the office or shop worker. It maybe a sad reflection on society in general but many people who work in organisations that come into contact with the public can find themselves in danger of abuse or physical attack. The NHS justifiably adopts a zero-tolerance stance to their staff being abused and will seek to prosecute offenders. If you’re that staff member facing an angry/upset/frightened/confused/grieving member of the public, and you’re alone on the reception desk, you’ll want to be able to covertly call for help. Shouting “HELP!” could quickly escalate the problem, so you’ll want to be as discreet as possible. The answer: a below the counter panic button.

In response to this need, our Healthcare Division has developed the “SAFE Panic Button” (OK it’s not a particularly imaginative name, but it’s a great clue to its purpose!). This is incredibly simple to use. Once the small PC program is installed, a dialog box asks for your name or location and the address of your network server. Then a small green button appears on your PC desktop, it will always be visible and stays on top of any applications you have running. You can simply click and slide the button to position it anywhere on the screen, your choice.  Safe is a small program and uses very little of your PC’s valuable resource and will happily run on the most basic of PCs.

Once installed, if you find yourself being threatened, or fear you might be, just click the button, when you do it instantly changes colour from green to red.  If your PC is equipped with speakers, you can set the software to sound an alarm, but most users like to keep it silent, not alerting the potential abuser to the action about to unfold. Other users on your network, that have SAFE Panic Button installed on their PC’s will see their button turn red and a pop-up window will tell them where the problem is. They can then come to your aid – en masse. You can get a full description of this innovative program here.

There is a plethora of information surrounding The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and it’s worth making sure that you’re adhering to the regulations from both a financial and compliance perspective. The ramifications of being caught without taking due care and attention of your workforce and the environment in which they operate are no walk in the park!

I know there is a great deal of brouhaha spouted about Health & Safety which makes the eyes of managers roll and shoulders shrug, but you can’t argue with the need to keep people safe, especially when incidents occur not as a result of objects or equipment in their environment, but from the very people they deal with, members of the public who seem incapable of controlling their anger or physical actions.

Whilst this system is not the most complex, it is certainly the most appropriate and functional to meet the needs of its users. If you have ever had to “press the button” I’d be very interested to hear your story and experience. Or maybe you have a similar system in a different environment to keep you or your workforce safe in the environment in which they work. If so, share your experiences and thoughts on these measures…

More advanced systems have also been adopted by the NHS to ensure that even when they are not on site, they can be as safe as possible. Just last year, 1,000 NHS community staff in Swansea were given “panic buttons” which open a one-way communication channel with the NHS control room who can listen in and remotely call police to attend a scene. More on this story can be read here…

More and more, we are seeing employers taking a more proactive role in ensuring their remote workforce are safe, and quite rightly so. The exciting aspect from our point of view here at Codegate is to see how this evolution is progressing and what we might see in the future…

If you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808.

Incident Reporting – Making Mobility Work for You

Posted on 6 April 2011 | No responses

Vehicle Fleet Managers have a tough job. Packed roads causing traffic delays, pressure to meet delivery deadlines and to reduce both Co2 emissions and fuel consumption, while managing the endless paper trail caused by random roadside inspections by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA), or other incidents on the road.

So how can Auto-ID help? With the introduction of accelerometer hardware in rugged mobile computers we can monitor harsh acceleration or braking by measuring g-force changes. We can report this back to Head Office promptly allowing management to take appropriate action, thereby helping to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 output.

By using the same data capture principles associated with our mobileworker applications, here at Codegate we can control, automate and simplify incident reporting. Many drivers are using rugged hand-held devices as both SatNav and job dispatch devices. We can use the same mobile device to run an additional program, our Incident Reporting Tool. This software will guide the driver through each part of the information gathering process, including;

• The incident location (geo-tagged automatically in the mobile)
• Date and time stamp (automatically captured in the mobile)
• Driver’s description of the incident
• Details of any other parties involved
• Details of any third party witnesses
• Name and ID of Police attending
• Details of scene in digital picture form
• A sketch or notation on the picture
• Insurance policy details of the other parties

With the added advantage of displaying full details of the driver’s insurance policy for easy reference, and with information being automatically date and time stamped, the employee needn’t provide further proof or evidence of where and when the incident occurred. The whole mobile solution takes the confusion, stress and worry out of incident reporting for all parties involved.

In addition to providing the driver with helpful prompts, at a time when he may be suffering some shock or confusion, the captured information is immediately sent to the Fleet Management team. This means everything captured at the scene is available for immediate processing without having to chase for follow up action or wait for completed forms to arrive.

Here’s the system in action on a Motorola MC65 sat in a vehicle cradle.

The potential savings for Fleet Managers in administration and time are enormous. But with a number of insurance companies indicating adopting a system like this could result in lower premiums, the saving could also be in hard cash. As the supermarket says, “Every little helps”.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts of how we can improve the capture details of road incidents, so please feel free to leave a comment below.

Alternatively if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808.

We’re always looking for people to contribute here on the Codegate blog, so if you’re interested in guest posting, then get in touch and let us know.

Windows Mobile 6.5 or Android? What next for Auto-ID Operating Systems?

Posted on 14 March 2011 | 1 response

All tier 1 manufacturers in the Auto-ID industry, e.g. Motorola, Intermec, Honeywell, etc., promote their products with Windows Mobile 6 or 6.5 as the de-facto Operating System (OS), but are times changing?

The Smartphone market has split into four camps, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, Apple’s iOS, HP’s Palm Web OS and Google’s Android, with the last three promoting themselves as more of a platform than just an OS. Apple’s App Store claims over 350,000 applications, Android’s Market has around 200,000 and HP’s Palm App Catalog claims thousands of applications. HP have just announced that Web OS (a new desktop PC operating system version) is to be sold on all new HP PCs, which assuming purchasers use the new OS, will add over 50 million users to the HP cause each year.

As a mobile solution specialist and software development company, Codegate has been developing applications for the Windows Mobile environment for many years and throughout this time there has been very little demand for any other OS. Now, we’re being asked about iOS and Android developments! Yet none of the tier 1 manufacturers listed above have launched rugged hand-held devices with anything other than Windows Mobile OS installed. This however is a situation which I believe is about to change…

Microsoft’s product road map is making 6.5.3 the last version of the Windows Mobile offering (formerly Windows Embedded CE), but with Windows Phone 7 they have made the OS demonstratively different to that of Windows Mobile 6.5, aligning it more towards consumer orientated smartphone and tablet devices. Does this leave our Auto-ID industry with a void which needs to be filled? Rugged hand-held devices running remote worker specific applications are unlikely to be best suited to an OS geared to appeal to consumers.

Motorola, Intermec and Honeywell will need to research utilising other OS platforms in future products or, where product life cycles permit, release variants of existing models with a different OS. Apple’s iOS would be excluded as it only runs on Apple hardware, HP’s Palm Web OS could be a contender but licencing and proprietary Intellectual Property (IP) issues may make this an expensive option. This leaves Google’s Android as the most likely contender for three main reasons:

1. It’s open source and free of IP or royalty issues
2. Each manufacturer can use it to develop their own USP features
3. It comes with a large experienced developer community

It’s surprising that none of the manufacturers in our sector have yet declared their intention to incorporate an alternative OS, although all of them are privately discussing the advantages of moving to an open source OS. Indeed Motorola is one of the founding companies to form the Open Handset Alliance in 2007. The Open Handset Alliance launched their first product in November 2007 – Android, a mobile device platform developed from a Linux kernel. Android remains a trademark of Google.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts of when the Auto-ID manufacturers will adopt a different OS, so please feel free to leave a comment below. Or, alternatively if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808

Mobile World Congress 2011 – The Enterprise Mobility View

Posted on 24 February 2011 | 1 response

Barcelona has once again hosted Mobile World Congress (MWC) which has lived up to previous events, revealing an insight of things to come in the mobile space.

Over 1,300 exhibitors with everything from Google’s enormous Android stand (the biggest I’ve ever seen) to Nokia’s announcement of its deal with Microsoft to be the operating system (OS) provider for all their smartphone handsets.

At MWC, lots of new handsets were announced from; Samsung, LG, HTC and Motorola to name but a few – the interesting point of note is that they all launched with Android OS. While MWC is a consumer orientated show, there’s a lot to interest the corporate buyer or business user as it can be a strong indicator of things to come in the enterprise environment.

Here’s my brief selection of what I thought was most interesting:

OK you get the picture, and as I’ve said before, what appears in the consumer market is bound to appear in the Auto-ID sector before long.

There has been widespread support for Near Field Communications (NFC) chipsets in many of the new products launched and commitment from most manufacturers to include the technology in the rest of their product developments in 2011. I’ve written about the importance of NFC before and expect its inclusion in Auto-ID products by the end of this year.

At MWC2011 we’ve seen more tablets, more storage, more cameras and more choice. But where does this leave all the Windows Mobile OS developers, given the march of both Google Android and Apples’ iOS platforms?

From even the brief list above it seems Google’s Android OS is becoming the platform of choice. Is it set to take the entire market? Well no, I don’t think so and here’s why. In the past our developers have had to rework their applications because of the hardware the customer wanted to use. Each manufacturer took a version of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS (not necessarily the same version) and “configured” it for the specific hardware for that project. Each implementation was different, each with its own unique characteristics. From our early experience of Android development the same applies, each hardware manufacturer, be it HTC, Motorola or Samsung, is implementing the OS to suit its equipment. However the rate of platform development for the Android OS would appear to be unprecedented with new versions coming thick and fast, we’re already up to version 3.0, the beautifully named ‘Honeycomb’.

If you’re a corporate customer contemplating issuing smartphone based mobiles for your remote workforce, be warned – develop for Android 3.0 and by the time you’ve finished your pilot, the OS will have changed considerably. Also, the smartphone hardware you chose from that highly reputable manufacturer is likely to be ‘end of life’ before you’ve finished deploying them. And by then, the comfort of knowing they were a cheaper option to an enterprise level device, will have lost all its initial attraction.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts of how the OS battle will play out within the consumer and enterprise market.

What platforms are your organisations running on?
Are you forever having to update your device for new firmware or software?
Do you suffer from downtime due to your device being repaired?

Please leave a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Or alternatively, if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808

Auto-ID in Construction – An Insight from The Executive Hire Show

Posted on 17 February 2011 | 1 response

As those of you that see our press releases may know, Codegate has achieved notable success in the construction Plant Hire industry. We have enabled companies to prove they’re meeting their SLAs with their contract customers, by providing transparency in everyday transactions. To research the industry demand for such systems we took a stand E15 at the Executive Hire Show (EHS), held at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry on the 9^th & 10^th of February.

EHS proved to be a positive exhibition of various Plant manufacturers, including JCB, Ifor Williams Trailers and Makita, as well as hire companies and service related providers. I say positive because the general attitude of exhibitors and visitors was upbeat and optimistic about the immediate future despite the likely impact of Government cuts. There was an almost universal recognition of the need to do more than improve competitiveness by cutting costs; there was also a need to win new customers through improved transparency of trade.

By transparency of trade, I mean that all organisations with contract customers (which is most of the construction business) being able to prove to their customers that the plant needed on-site was delivered on time, or that the equipment was collected on the day it was due to be removed and if applicable its condition was recorded as damaged.

What’s important here is proof!

I observed people consciously linking the electronic proof of delivery captured by the recipient signing on the display of a mobile device, accepting delivery, and the automatic capture of the date, time and geographic location of that signature, to fewer invoice disputes. Visitors also saw our demonstration of an image of a damaged piece of equipment, captured at the time of collection from a site, as a powerful persuader to significantly reducing his customers’ ability to argue about who should be paying for the damage.

OK this provides the proof but to really benefit from this on-site data capture there needs to be one more process. Your customer needs to be able to access all his transactional information, on-line, any time he wishes. He should be able to login to a web portal on your web site and view all this captured information. He should be able to view:

This is obviously not an exhaustive list but illustrates the type of entries that can be included.

What’s important here is transparency!

At the show our visitors saw a real opportunity to convert this transactional transparency into profit! This proves SLAs are being met and it proves invoices are justified. This reduces disputes, improves the customers’ perception of your service and helps to protect you from ‘price only’ competition, after all, would you buy from someone who can prove their value to you or someone who is just cheap?

At EHS we received a lot of interest and encouragement for the systems we’re producing, but the real buzz was caused by the genuine excitement of what seemed to be an almost renewed, but evidently vibrant industry.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts of how the construction industry is fairing, so please feel free to leave a comment below. Or, alternatively if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808

An app, but at what price?

Posted on 14 February 2011 | 1 response

The advent of the iPhone has brought with it a plethora of apps all available via the AppStore, now we also have Google’s app store in the ‘Android Market’. Both of these stores offer apps for as little as £0.59p and in some cases, even free. With anything from gaming and photography apps to personal development and finance available at just once click, the convenience is unparalleled.

Downloads from the AppStore have now surpassed 10,000,000,000; 10Bn; yes that’s right, ten billion. There are now over 300,000 apps to choose from, with almost every requirement catered for. There are thus a staggering number of developers always looking to launch the next big thing for very little. A £0.59p app can be developed with very few overheads, take away Apple’s commission of 30% and each app rewards the developer with £0.413p of revenue, so if he sells a million copies he makes £413,000. Not too bad really, but the key here is that the app needs to have very widespread appeal, which is very unlikely to be the case for focussed enterprise applications.

So how could this be casting an ill-informed shadow on specialist mobile solution companies like Codegate?

There’s no avoiding the fact that we’re in challenging financial times and organisations are looking for ways to save money. This short term view has led to an increase in the deployment of consumer grade devices within the enterprise, where previously, rugged mobile computers would have been present. Added to this is the convenience of technology in everyone’s pockets, with smartphones and tablets now handling so many aspects of work and life, individuals are demanding that their mobility solution also integrates into their existing devices and platforms.

This convenience has stemmed from an evolution of computing technologies, which has led to us having in our pocket, something which holds more power than the space craft which landed the first men on the moon. We have come to expect everything to be incorporated into one device, the ultimate in unified devices. We have reached a stage where Apple now not only allow iPhone and iPad users to download apps for their handheld devices,  but they have also enabled software download for laptops and desktop computers, so there is now a reduced need for physical media such as CDs as relevant software can be downloaded from any location with a Wi-Fi connection, making the whole offering more mobile.

Now whilst all of this sounds wonderfully beneficial to the end user, there’s still a huge gap between a one-size fits all app and a mobile solution deployment from a company such as Codegate.

The challenge we face is that with the increase in app availability and reduction in apparent cost, businesses have become skewed in their opinions of mobile solutions. Here at Codegate, we tailor everything about the application to suit the individual customer because we know that no two organisations are the same. Legacy systems, back office systems, CRM applications, all of these vary from customer to customer, each needing a tailored interface and architecture. Would this be possible with a one-size fits all app from the AppStore…No! Consumer apps on consumer grade devices are one thing, but specifically crafted enterprise level applications on consumer grade devices are completely another.

We are increasingly receiving enquiries around deployment on Smartphones and look forward to seeing the same trend with tablets in coming months. We will be keeping a close eye on MWC taking place from today until the 17^th which much like CES, often gives an idea of what devices and platforms are set to dominate in the next 12 months. We will see once again a plethora of tablets being unveiled, or will very consumer oriented devices such as the Sony Playstation Phone take the limelight? We will be sure to keep you updated on news as we discover it via our twitter account @CodegateLtd.

If you’re looking to deploy a mobile solution, get in touch; give me a call, drop me an email or come and say hi on twitter.

For further information around the solutions which we provide, head over to our website…

What can CES 2011 tell us about where mobile computing is heading?

Posted on 28 January 2011 | 1 response

The Consumer Electronic Show (CES), held in Las Vegas in early January, was an excellent showcase for what’s new in the consumer electronics field. It was also a pointer to what we can expect mobile computing as a whole to be like in the coming months.

You’d expect CES to be all about televisions and mobile phones, and it is, but it’s also about Smartphones and Tablet computers. Apple’s introduction last year of the iPhone 4 and the iPad seems to have spurred on other manufacturers to design similar devices. Long standing smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Blackberry, HTC and Motorola have all launched new products in this space, as well as more computing focussed brands such as Dell and Asus entering the Tablet market.

Let’s highlight Motorola for a moment.  In our sector it’s the largest manufacturer of rugged hand-held computers and Auto-ID scanners through their Motorola Solutions arm, previously ‘Symbol’. But its previously troubled mobile phone division has recently been through a metamorphic change. On 4^th January 2011 Motorola Inc. separated into two publicly traded companies, the new offspring in addition to Motorola Inc. being Motorola Mobility Inc. CES was its opportunity to launch the innovative Motorola Atrix™ 4G Smartphone, the first dual-core processor Smartphone which has a Laptop Dock, enabling it to power a full keyboard and screen.

This innovative product extends the trend toward personal computing where one device becomes the gateway to all your computing needs, wherever you need it. Motorola’s Atrix powers an otherwise dumb, processor-less laptop, but it can also become the centre of a HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) connected audio/visual presentation system, or an in-car communications module. In other words, a complete Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) powering desktop, laptop and on-the-move computing for business and personal applications. Welcome to “The Atrix Ecosystem”.

We can see many applications where the ability to transform a PDA into a laptop, drive a multimedia presentation system or directly interface it to consumer devices would be beneficial. Field engineers who need to look at circuit diagrams, sound engineers accessing public address systems, viewing graphic mixers, or building environmental control system engineers, could all see full screen graphic illustrations from their Smartphone when and where they’re needed. The business benefits of utilising a single Smartphone sized PDA could be substantial.

CES is also where industry leaders from companies like Microsoft and Intel show us their vision of where the wider computing industry is heading. But this year saw new leaders providing the vision, Google with their Android (V3.0 Honeycomb) operating system and NVIDIA with their dual-core Tegra2™ processor appearing in many of the Smartphone, Tablets and even in-car systems. NVIDIA announced it is to partner with ARM to launch its own processor the size of a small coin, specifically for the mobile sector. Intel is strangely quiet about this sector and Microsoft, after their launch of Windows Phone 7™ last year, appear to be taking a back seat to Android.

Personally, I believe the volume of product produced for the consumer market will provide the momentum to drive down the cost of products used in the enterprise mobile computing environment. Innovative designs aimed primarily at the personal market will filter, where appropriate, to the corporate arena, as evidenced by Tablets (iPads) being introduced into many solicitors and banking offices, not to mention other areas of work.

The real message to be taken from CES for our industry is; the Tablet computer has arrived. The Tablet isn’t new but it has now come of age. IT departments are beginning to accept Tablet devices into their corporate networks and their applications. Users are demanding bigger screens and slimmer products, with faster processors enabling full multitasking capability. In Auto-ID this represents a whole new genre of device that will open up new applications and markets. Interestingly Microsoft Windows, or derivative, is not the popular operating system driving these Tablets. As yet we don’t know who will take the crowning glory of being the favoured tablet interface, however for now I think it’s fair to say, given the volume of sales, Apple iOS is the platform of choice.

Here at Codegate we’re experiencing an increase in requests for software development on tablet systems and touch interface smartphones as their capability and availability soars. These are very exciting times with new developments on the horizon and new facilitating technologies being released all the time into the hands of the user…what is still hard to grasp is the speed at which all this change is happening!

Have you seen Tablet devices installed in the enterprise? I’d be very interested in your thoughts. Please feel free to leave a comment below. Or, alternatively if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a mobile solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808

Remember, you can always keep up to date with what we’re writing here and what we’re up to via our twitter feed @CodegateLtd. Come and say hi!

Guest Post: Casting a Light on Meaningful Mobility

Posted on 11 January 2011 | 1 response

For this installment on The Codegate Blog, we’re thrilled to bring you this post written exclusively for us by Rob Bamforth – Principal Analyst, Communications, Collaboration & Convergence, Quocirca.

Advances in IT have had a liberating effect in most working environments. As well as providing employees with tools to automate mundane tasks, modern digital communications permit activities to be conducted at a distance or while on the move.

The flexibility and power of remote and mobile working has soared as networks and devices have evolved from simple telephony and occasionally synchronised laptops to real time, rich media, always on connectivity for devices as small as handheld smartphones. Work that once required travel to site can be performed remotely, decisions and actions can be taken where most relevant on the move and co-ordinated based on actual location and proximity to customers, supplies or other services.

This has become more than simply the automation of an existing business process, but the potential for a significant evolution of business processes to make them more efficient and effective.

There have been many attempts at ‘business process re-engineering’, either derived from methodologies that encourage a major switch in focus, say towards outsourcing, quality, customer service or just-in-time services, as well as those derived directly from technology innovation. Neither has been entirely satisfactory; the former generally flounders as internal resistance or inertia builds, and the latter often suffers from an over-emphasis or reliance on a particular technology, rather than its generic benefit.

This has clearly happened with the mobile bandwagon. Quocirca research has regularly indicated that mobile deployments are rarely based on a pre-determined strategy or with sufficient support from suitable policies. Too often ad hoc decisions are made, such as when mobile email took off as a wave of executives picked BlackBerrys, while many thought they were being more responsive, few questioned whether it was really providing value to the organization, or even the individuals.

With business focus sharpened by economic downturn, these decisions are now more keenly reviewed, but there is a counter risk of taking a blunt axe to spending or investment in mobile technologies, without really understanding their true benefits to the business.

Too often the mobile budget is controlled within IT and is seen as a rapidly rising cost – especially with escalating growth in smartphones and numbers of users in general – rather than something that brings value to the business.  The key to fixing this is to step beyond the ephemeral and indirect benefits of ‘more responsive’ or ‘available to collaborate’ and to understand if mobile working is making a meaningful impact.

This means gathering an explicit view of how people work, and where mobile technology makes a difference.  Many years ago this would have been done by someone carrying a stopwatch and clipboard performing a time and motion study. It would be subjective, intrusive and ultimately not very constructive, accurate or informative. Workers took affront at what they saw as attempts to change them personally and the business would probably get little or no improvement.

Gathering the information today can be done automatically, objectively and simply, with inputs and outputs measured directly when they occur, and with modern mobile devices, where they happen. So, since far more information can be gathered about the precise nature of the business process itself, it can be used to change the process, not the person.

This is the real meaning of mobility. It is not about simply managing mobile networks, devices or applications, but how the mobile user interacts with them to make their tasks more straightforward, therefore enabling the streamlining of business processes.  This not only benefits the business in the form of improved efficiency, lowering costs and ultimately boosting profits, but also reduces complexity and frustration for the employee.

Mobility can be set out with an all-embracing strategy and well-thought out policies, but unless it is based on the sound and accurately measured understanding of reality, it is really just moving around in the dark.

Track the Van or Track the Man?

Posted on 29 November 2010 | 1 response

The market for vehicle tracking is extremely competitive with an increasing number of suppliers vying for your money with enticing offers of only £0.001p per day. OK, that’s possibly a slight exaggeration but it would seem perfectly possible to have a satellite tracking device fitted to your company vehicle for as little as £0.40p per day, but what do you actually get for that?

A discreet “black box” could be installed in your truck, van or company car, which will record:

• ignition on/off
• geographic location
• time and date

Automating the above each day thanks to the “black box” technology, enables you to monitor where your expensive assets are. For an additional cost, you may wish to record speed and excessive acceleration or harsh braking to help reduce your carbon footprint (adhering to the ever more rigorous guidelines on green operations) and help protect your drivers. All this will help your fleet become more efficient, but you could do more.

Knowing the location of your vehicle is important, but knowing your employee has access to the details of the customer they’re visiting, the sales history of each account, or even the model and history of the equipment he’s servicing, may be crucial to his role. A rugged hand-held computer or mobile smartphone running suitable software can display these details and if it’s equipped with a GPS chipset, the device can record the location of your employee. Capturing digital signatures and minimising invoicing disputes by having evidence of when the work was done will prove you’ve met your customers’ SLAs, something which we covered in a previous post here.

As responsible employers we all know that we have a duty of care for each employee and tracking the vehicle helps with identifying their whereabouts but what if they leave the van and proceed on foot. How can we be sure they’re safe when the van hasn’t moved for two hours? Armed with a mobile device, we can track their movement beyond the van, into the housing estate and, when fitted with the ‘lone worker module’ we can be certain they’re able to notify us if in difficulty.

So what of the cost difference? Surely it’s much cheaper to use vehicle tracking rather than buying a rugged hand-held device for each field worker? Well yes it often is, but we’re comparing apples with bananas. Satellite vehicle tracking provides some savings by helping to concentrate drivers’ minds on keeping speed and braking under control but in practice you’d need a separate SatNav system to guide him to the customer address, at an additional cost.

The rugged hand-held or smartphone device installed with the appropriate software solution has a cost but it can also provide;

• A daily log of mileage, tyre pressures, oil, coolant and washer bottle levels
• Satellite Navigation powered by suitable software
• Latitude/Longitude geo-positioning in or out of the vehicle with date and time stamps
• Job or call scheduling and job specific information
• Lone worker protection and monitoring
• Accurate data capture using the integral barcode scanner
• Electronic proof of delivery
• Accident or incident reporting with digital image scanning and time stamping

Given the choice, what do you think, should we trace the vehicle or the man? Indeed, what do you currently track?

I’d be very interested in your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment below. Or, alternatively if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808

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