Mobilizing the Field Force: The Next Evolution of Business Transformation

From the shop floor to the top floor, mobile solutions are enabling manufacturers to cut costs, improve productivity, reduce design cycle times, enhance product collaboration and speed products to market. Intel and HP are helping manufacturers make the most of mobile computing with HP’s nw8240, Mobile Engineering Workstation based on Intel® Centrino™ Mobile Technology.

Mobile workers—both in the field and on location in a plant, warehouse or design environments—are seeing their world change. As a result of recent innovations in computing technology, leading companies are equipping these workers with new tools that enable them to dramatically improve the way in which they work. In so doing, businesses are opening up new avenues of profitability and performance, and ultimately gaining market advantage. These new tools are known as mobilized solutions and they are designed to address the unique needs of an ever more mobile field force.

Business Challenge Today: The Underutilized Worker
Before we discuss these latest technology developments, let us first define the landscape, starting with the unique attributes of the mobile worker. The mobilized work force breaks down into two basic types of employee: the field force mobile worker and the on-location mobile worker.

Mobile field workers are typically field service employees from various industries who collect data and accomplish tasks/jobs while moving from point to point within a city, district or region. These workers can be found in a range of industries including transportation and parcel delivery, utilities, construction management and architecture, product service and support. These field force workers are the lifeblood of many businesses; today, thanks to new mobilized computing devices and applications, they can deliver enhanced services that go far beyond data collection and repair. These enhanced service capabilities better serve clients’ needs and provide additional revenue opportunities for companies.

Take customer relationship management, for example. In the course of servicing a nonfunctioning washing machine at a customer’s home, a repair technician can wirelessly access the machine’s sales and maintenance history. In doing so, he may notice that the appliance’s maintenance contract is about to expire. The technician can apprise the customer of this fact, offer her an appropriate extended warranty and conclude the transaction while still on site.

Mobile on-location workers are those employees who work at a specific location, but one that is outside of a traditional office environment. Unlike the mobile field worker, these employees are typically mobile only within a proscribed area such as a warehouse, factory floor, hotel, etc.

Traditionally, field and on-location workers have lagged behind other employee groups in the use of computing technology primarily because existing devices were not well suited to their non-office working environments. These devices were often cumbersome and heavy with limited battery life—this is now changing.

Enter Mobilized Computing
Mobilized computing is all about enabling the worker and eliminating dependencies on paper-based business activities. Mobilized computing is about creating new sources of revenue, driving tremendous gains in productivity, doing away with repetitive data entry, enabling proactive customer service and much more.

Mobilized computing solutions consist of three components:

1. Wireless connectivity
2. Mobile devices and
3. Mobilized software.

To make the most of mobilized technology infrastructure, companies must deploy mobilized software applications. These applications maintain and manage network awareness, meaning that at any given time, the mobile device and resident applications recognize whether there is a connection to a network. Based on available connectivity, the application facilitates information exchange with the corporate server and database environments from the remote or mobile work environment. In some instances, applications can also detect available bandwidth so data can be streamed or trickled to the mobile device.

The end result is a mobilized solution containing a set of application enabled features which free workers from managing network connections and information on their devices. Information is available when the user needs it, whether online or offline.

Offline data management allows the application to provide the same user experience regardless of connection status. When working offline, the user is able to interact, manipulate and save data. This data can later be synchronized with the corporate environments when connectivity to those environments becomes available.

A maintenance worker, for instance, can document and close a trouble ticket in the field, then replicate and share that information with the corporate environment long before he arrives at the service depot at the end of the day. In fact, because all work performed during that day was captured, recorded and published throughout the day from the mobile device and application in the field, the worker may be able to completely eliminate the end-of-day paperwork and trip back to the office to document and process the day’s activities.

Additionally, mobilized applications allow users to access and manipulate data on the appropriate device for their job while at the same time allowing the application development team to write and manage a single application deployed across these divergent devices. Some workers may need a larger screen size to record and analyze data. Others may need a smaller form factor with longer battery life to capture data in the field rather than analyze it.

Whatever the device, mobilized solutions permit field workers to manipulate data and communicate from their environment with intelligent network and application connectivity. In addition, mobilized solutions enable mobile field workers to utilize their devices and applications longer because of the intelligent power management that is part of the mobile device and the applications that rely on that power. These characteristics—offline, multi-platform, intelligent connectivity and power management—make up what are called the “four vectors” of mobilized computing applications.

Simply put, mobilized solutions allow field workers to work, regardless of where they are, what mobile devices they need to do their job, how they may be connected or whether they are connected at all.

Why should business care about mobilized solutions? Because the convergence of the three elements of mobilized solutions— the wireless network, plus mobilized devices and software— creates opportunities for productivity improvements previously unavailable to workers and companies.

Any one of these three elements individually is far less compelling than when the three are deployed together. Think about how the computing environment has evolved. Companies gave their employees notebooks so they could compute and work while away from the office—on the plane, at a customer site, in a hotel room. Within the office, companies also started to implement wireless LAN (WLAN) technology that replaced the cubicle hard-wired to a LAN through the wall or ceiling with a wireless LAN. WLANs eliminate the cost of hard-wiring offices or retrofitting them with moves, adds and changes. With the proliferation of wireless networks, employees no longer have to wait to get back to their hotel room at the end of the day and spend an hour and a half synching up over a dial-up connection to the network.

Finally, add the third component—applications that are productive regardless of the network state (connected or unconnected) and can work on any device. These mobilized applications perform the same functions as their traditional counterparts— e-mail, customer service and support, office, accounting and financial, inventory and distribution management, procurement and so on. Bring these three components together and you see the opportunities they create to transform the work environment in significant ways. Employees can now do their work anywhere, at any time, and have full access to the enterprise’s information resources.

Sit Up and Take Notice
Mobilized solutions are beginning to attract serious attention from both the public and private sector. According to a recent survey of 1200-plus IT managers across North America, Western Europe, China and Latin America conducted by IDC, 62 percent of respondents said they plan to deploy new mobilized applications within the next 24 months.

Automation of field force and on-location mobile workers is happening today and will continue to evolve and expand into more and more sectors of the economy. The trend is global in nature. We see examples in all of the major geographies and in many industry sectors today—manufacturing, retail, healthcare, energy, transportation and others. Why? Because of the concrete return on investment these transformational solutions deliver. These returns include increased efficiencies, improved business processes and greater responsiveness to the needs of the business. These types of innovative solutions not only transform existing job functions but in many cases create new and exciting processes for the targeted mobile worker. Let’s look at some case examples to illustrate this point.

Luzhou Laojiao, one of China’s premier wine and liquor producers, operates sales offices in 20 cities and manages more than 2,000 vaults filled with product spread out over a 40 kilometer radius of Luzhou city. Business over the past several years has been good. In 2003, Luzhou Laojiao’s sales income reached RMB 1.7 billion, an 87 percent increase over 2002, with profits reaching RMB 200 million. By 2007, senior management has set the aggressive goal of RMB 5 billion in sales and RMB 400 million in profit.

Luzhou Laojiao needed information management systems and processes capable of supporting this growth goal. The company decided to invest in a system that enabled its 300-plus management and marketing personnel scattered at sales and production sites all across China to communicate and collaborate frequently. This system would replace the company’s existing information management backbone consisting of an original LAN connecting just 60 desktop and 20 notebook computers, augmented by high volumes of paper, telephone and fax communication.

Luzhou Laojiao enlisted Intel to design a collaborative business solution based on a wireless LAN and Intel® Centrino™ mobile technology. The HQ offices were fitted with wireless hotspots and a GPRS network covered the 20 sales offices.

Luzhou Laojiao’s technology investment started paying dividends immediately. It supports information synchronization that allows management to get the latest business information. The solution lets the company condense volumes of paper documents into an online system collaboration zone, streamlining information flows and enabling easy enquiry processes. It allows closer tracking of production throughout Luzhou Laojiao’s entire value chain, thereby eliminating waste and improving overall profitability.

Another large industrial company looked to wireless technology to address similar issues. A large gas and engineering supplier, the company equipped its 8,500 service engineers and managers with powerful, lightweight PCs based on Intel® Centrino™ mobile technology and mobilized software solutions which could connect wirelessly to the corporate environment. Today, as a result of investing in the notebook deployment, service engineers spend significantly more time in the field and can handle 250% more customer calls. With information at their fingertips, service engineers can deliver a better customer experience, helping increase customer satisfaction. It’s also helped them turn the service arm from a losing enterprise to a key revenue generating business, contributing 25% of the company’s profits.

Inside a plant’s four walls, mobilized computing technologies can generate equally impressive results. A major automotive manufacturer equipped plant maintenance technicians with mobilized laptops to help streamline their work activities as they tend to the programmable logic controllers that run assembly line machines.

In the past, these technicians worked off of paper service tickets issued with each different job. Technicians were constantly walking back and forth to maintenance offices to collect reference materials and other documents needed to make the repair and close out a ticket. Given the size of the auto production facility and the distances involved, this back-and-forth travel added up to a great deal of lost time.

Now, equipped with mobilized technology, technicians can retrieve work orders, design specifications, reference materials and controller software updates right on the factory floor. Having real-time access to maintenance information enables them to close out service tickets faster. Technicians can deploy and debug machine controller software updates with their wireless notebooks, thus getting the factory asset online faster and improving facility output. And, using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), maintenance management can dispatch service technicians to their next job while the technicians are out on the plant floor—again saving time and utilizing labor more productively.

Benefits in a Design and Manufacturing Environment
These aspects of mobilizing the field force naturally translate well to the design and manufacturing environments as the 4 vectors of mobilized computing have advanced dramatically which include Battery Life, Form Factor, Performance, wireless Connectivity.

As an example, HP and Intel are now providing workstation performance in a mobile package with the HP nw8240 mobile workstation. Designed for engineers with data rich application demands, the nw8240 is complete with the performance configurations with leading MCAD ISV Certifications including Dassault CATIA V5, ATI Mobility FireGL V5000 Open GL Graphics, 1GB DIMM, Bluetooth modules and extensive battery life. Powered by Intel® Centrino™ Mobile Technology to provide system performance, optimal battery performance, wireless connectivity and portable form factors to enable design anywhere, anytime.

Some of the benefits of mobility for design and manufacturing environments:

• Higher productivity
• Faster, more accurate data capture and analysis
• Significant reductions in paperwork
• Improved customer service levels
• Faster decision-making
• Reduce design cycles and greater accuracy
• Increased safety and audit compliance

Beyond Automating the Status Quo
In these varied examples, organizations have gone beyond simply automating existing processes to achieve incremental improvements—and have reaped significant benefits as a result. Just automating existing processes does not take advantage of the true opportunity mobilized solutions present. The goal is not just to incrementally improve processes. Rather, the goal is to transform them outright. The way to do that is by turning data into information that means something—information that creates new linkages between customers, operations and suppliers.

Mobilized solutions are changing the way field force and on-location mobile employees work. As a result, they are transforming the way organizations conduct business, enabling them to be more profitable, competitive and faster to market. The solutions allow organizations to develop better customer relationships, improve employee job satisfaction and generally give these previously overlooked workers technology tools that help them do their jobs better.

Mobilizing field force workers is the next evolution of optimizing revenue in business. Organizations have an enormous opportunity to transform how business, employees and consumers interact. The time to go after this opportunity is now.

For more information on mobilized technology and solutions, go to: www.intel.com/go/mobilizedsolutions and www.mobilizedsoftware.com, or for specific information on the HP nw8240, visit www.hp.com/workstations/pws/index.html

Multi-tasking with Dual-core Processing

As an engineer, it’s probably not too often that you have only one application running on your workstation. Between CAD, word processing, spreadsheets, email, analysis and others, you need to stay in touch with many programs to remain productive.

But all these applications soak up compute cycles, memory and machine resources, leaving your main CAD application underpowered. And some applications put such a strain on single-processor workstations that any attempt to open another application with the main application also running causes almost immediate trouble.

Until recently you had few solutions to this problem, and they were all expensive—either a two-processor workstation or two single-processor machines. Now there is another option that may be just the ticket for intense engineering and modeling environments with limited budgets and desk space—a dual-core workstation.

A new choice
The Intel® Pentium® D processor puts two separate processing cores, with separate cache, on the same CPU die. The result is more processing capability within the same footprint. Your main CAD application can run on one core, while the second handles other programs. And the price won’t break the budget.

The Intel Pentium D dual-core processor provides its greatest benefits with either multi-threaded applications designed for use with multiple-processing workstations, or in multi-tasking environments running a variety of applications at the same time. The work is spread out over the two processing cores, allowing each application to process more efficiently. The result is between a 15 and 30 percent boost in performance over a similarly priced single-core processor workstation.

Dual-core power and 64-bit addressability
As a close partner of Intel, HP works to offer users the latest Intel technologies earlier than their competitors and in more robust, exhaustively-tested and certified packages.

HP’s newest offering is the HP xw4300 Workstation, an economical solution with unprecedented power and flexibility. The HP xw4300 is available either with standard Intel Pentium 4 single-core processors or the new Intel Pentium D dual-core processor for more demanding environments.

Like all of HP’s new workstations, the HP xw4300 supports 32-bit Microsoft Windows XP Professional or 64-bit Windows. The 64-bit edition of Microsoft Windows supports more memory, allowing you to work with huge data sets efficiently and without “out of memory” errors. Combined with dual-core processing, that presents a powerful advantage in a very economical solution.

With the Intel Pentium D dual-core processor and the HP xw4300 workstation, you can now multitask without compromise.

For more information on the HP xw4300 Workstation with Intel Pentium D processor, click here. (http://www.hp.com/workstations/pws/xw4300/xw4300.pdf)

For more information about HP/Dassault Systemes Alliance, please visit www.hp.com/go/catia.