Enterprise mobility is forecast to take off throughout 2011. Danielle Cullen presents some good reasons why.
A recent Sybase survey found that more than 90 per cent of companies intend to implement at least one mobile application this year. Almost half of the companies surveyed said that they would implement between five and 19 applications. So why are companies choosing to pursue mobile solutions?
1. Increase workforce productivity
More than half of the respondents in the Sybase survey intended to implement mobile applications to increase productivity. This is a key factor expressed by many Australian companies pursuing a mobile strategy. By mobilising core SAP functionality, employees and executives no longer need to be at their desks or logged onto SAP to perform key tasks. Restrictions such as working hours or physical location no longer affect productivity.
Some of the most popular SAP mobile solutions implemented to date include purchase order, timesheet and expense approval applications for managers. This means that they can easily approve SAP documents while travelling or in between meetings without needing to log onto an SAP system.
2. Reach a wider audience
Traditionally SAP systems have had a very internal focus and have provided business functionality for the employees of a company. SAP mobility turns this around. Applications can be built for customers, suppliers and partners that are easy-to-use and look and feel just like a normal web or smartphone application. But behind the scenes these applications are communicating with and performing business tasks in SAP in a simple, secure and safe way. Customers can place orders, edit their account information or view purchase history. Suppliers can use applications that predict when more stock will be required. In fact, almost any external transaction that relies on SAP data can be provided in an intuitive easy-to-use application.
3. Increase sales
Providing customers with the ability to buy products or services in an easy and convenient manner is a sure-fire way to increase sales. According to the Australian Centre for Retail Studies (ACRS), approximately 36 per cent of Australians are making purchases online at least once a month, and 6 per cent are buying online at least once a week. And these numbers are set to increase. Retailers are taking notice of this. According to a Forrester report conducted last year, 69 per cent of retailers are planning to invest in improving website content and 66 per cent will spend more time on online marketing to drive sales and growth.
Online shopping carts that directly lodge a sales order in SAP are an easy way to do this, but companies are increasingly looking at complementary applications to really boost client ratings. A good example of this is a delivery tracking application, enabling customers to see when their goods have left the warehouse and the estimated delivery date.
4. Improved response times
A mobile workforce using SAP-integrated applications results in a back-end system that is constantly up-to-date. This facilitates improved decision-making and enables faster response times. Employee Health and Safety (EH&S) is another area of SAP forecast for exceptional growth over the next 12 months with the introduction of Enhancement Pack 5. We predict that this will result in a strong focus on mobile solutions for EH&S, enabling executives to quickly respond to incidents that occur in off-site locations with all the details available to them in real-time. Of course for these types of applications, offline access is a must, with captured data being transmitted as soon as connectivity becomes available to those involved.
5. Market leadership
Companies are increasingly using mobile applications as a marketing tool to establish their position in the market and increase market share. Within Australia, we have seen a flurry of applications from the banking sector as they use mobile technologies to attract and retain customers. In fact throughout 2010, Australian banks experienced triple-digit growth in smartphone transaction volumes, with St George Bank reporting that its smartphone transaction volume within the last year is equivalent to the activity of 40 physical branches. We are seeing now that enterprise mobility is following consumer market trends with companies starting to offer market-differentiating services and solutions to customers, employees, partners and suppliers.
6. Reduced operational costs
Mobile applications reduce operational costs in a number of ways. By working with intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, users can quickly and easily complete complex business transactions without the need to understand the intricacies of the back-end SAP system. Labour-intensive data entry is reduced by automated business processes such as order creation or timesheet entry. Sixty-three per cent of respondents in the Sybase survey confirmed that cost saving was a key factor influencing the general adoption of new mobile applications within their company.
7. Lower training expenses
Most SAP users are ‘lightweight’ users of the ERP system, meaning that they only ever use SAP for simple tasks such as timesheet and expense entry or other HR activities. As a result, many companies are now choosing to provide easy-to-use applications to do this – accessible from the company intranet or mobile devices. While this of course doesn’t get around the SAP licence fees, it does reduce the need for expensive and time-consuming
training courses to familiarise employees with how to log on and use the standard SAP system.
8. Improved customer satisfaction
Mobile is quickly becoming an important factor in measuring customer satisfaction. Customers now expect to be able to find all of the information they need quickly and easily online. And the ability for stores to offer mobile payment functionality is expected to be a key differentiating factor within the next one to two years. Starbucks in the USA offers this service and recently completed its one millionth mobile sale. In many cases, the difference between a good or bad mobile experience can determine the ultimate purchasing decision. And it’s not just B2C transactions affected by this. Increasingly B2B customers are expecting the same sort of web and mobile access to information, and the ability to quickly and easily place orders and perform other key business tasks online.
9. Retain and attract a quality workforce
High-calibre employees are attracted to companies that implement and move forward with the latest technologies. It’s not just graduates and Gen Y employees susceptible to this – executives and other workers are increasingly interested in the devices available to them and the user experiences that can be provided. Increasingly companies are providing smartphones (particularly iPhones) to employees as they are perceived as an important employee benefit and key retention factor. And with a mobile workforce that exceeded one billion workers in 2010, employees now expect to be able to perform key business tasks from their mobile devices. Companies need to be able to offer their employees the latest technology, and the ability to work from their devices.
10. Real-time accurate information
With the first wave of enterprise mobility, applications were introduced enabling field workers to download information onto their mobile devices at the start of each day which they could then access and edit. They would synchronise this the next time they were connected to the main system. The latest mobile technologies are very different. Communication with SAP is real-time and in some cases, even predictive. We envisage a wave of ‘smart’ applications being introduced later this year that predict what the worker is going to do and supply the correct information. For example, the geo-location of a mobile sales worker could determine which customer the employee is visiting and then request all of the necessary information from SAP – such as sales history, pricing offers and customer details. 2011 will continue to be an exciting time for SAP mobility. It is a key focus area for many consultancies and customers and also for SAP themselves. As Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP says, “Mobility is the new desktop.”
Danielle Cullen is operations manager at Clarimont Consulting (www.clarimont.com), a specialist consultancy delivering end-to-end mobile solutions for SAP.
This article was first published in Inside SAP March/April 2011.
