It seems only yesterday that BlackBerry mania swept through offices, meaning unless you were underground, in the air, or had found one of the ever decreasing mobile blackspots in deepest Norfolk, you could always make contact with your office. This provided email and internet, and then, as smart phones got more sophisticated, spreadsheets, PowerPoint and downloading.
But now, small and medium-sized firms in particular are transforming the way they work with more advanced mobile applications, says software provider eSay, which has carried out extensive research into the mobile business applications (MBA) market. Colin Yates, the company's European sales director, says: “The first revolution was giving people a phone, the second was picking up email, the cusp of the explosion right now is extending the back office on mobile devices.”
eSay research has found that by 2011, more than 2.4m MBAs will be purchased each year in the UK. Currently, you can find mobile applications for tasks such as distribution, fleet management, field service, sales, compliance tracking, time and travel management, invoicing, and inventory control.
Jo Groves, co-founder of business mobile and data solutions provider Active Digital, has noted the shift: "More and more are requesting fast, remote access from everything from email, contacts and calendars through to customer relationship management, resource planning and supply chain management systems."
But Yates adds: “People still aren’t fully aware that technology can now deliver what it was always meant to do.”
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Businesses of all sizes are waking up to mobile applications. For example, Ladbrokes relies heavily on them in the way its engineers manage its 2,200 betting shops. The company worked with mobile data solution provider Cognito to implement a workforce management system, through which engineers receive details of their next job electronically. The system then allocates the best-placed engineer to a job automatically, improving responsiveness and efficiency.
But small firms, unencumbered by hefty bureaucracy, are the ones generally adopting this technology quickly, being more open to innovation and risk.
Vehicle tracking, for example, is quickly becoming indispensable for companies such as McAllisters Recovery. This small firm has 52 rescue vehicles, all of which have a terminal to receive details of their next job. Thanks to global positioning satellite (GPS) technology, the office always knows where the vehicles are located, again improving the allocation process.
