Ashish Kothari

Web design and development by:

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Introduction

While the world has been mesmerized by the internet revolution and has been singing songs of the productivity increases associated with the internet, a quiet revolution has been underway unnoticed by many with little press coverage. There are off-beat mentions of the “palm revolution” and how mobile hand-sets and appliances will change the way humanity surfs. However, not many have directly addressed the huge opportunity hand-helds offer in terms of harnessing increased productivity and reducing costs through out the enterprise. In this article, we will highlight some of these opportunities, identify some leaders in their industries who have deployed mobile applications on PDAs, briefly discuss some of the technological challenges that the PDA applications face versus traditional client server applications, and lastly leave you with some thoughts on key items to consider as you embark on your mission to harness the power of mobile apps to gain a competitive advantage against your competitors.

Hospitals: A mobile application

Ed is busy at work when he starts to feel dizzy and develops an abdominal ache. He accesses the MyHealth application running on his PDA and accesses the Schedule Appointment option. Ed’s medical and insurance information in addition to his General Practitioner’s information is stored on his PDA. The application asks Ed a couple of questions about his ailment, what he ate for lunch and recommends first aid he can take for temporary relief. The application also asks Ed to select the urgency of the doctor’s visit. Taking this information and using Ed’s calendar, the application logs in to the hospital’s database, looks up the Doctor’s schedule and sets the earliest appointment which works for both of them. The application also automatically fills out a appointment reason form for Ed indicating the trouble he is facing. 

On the appointment date, when Ed walks into the Hospital, he checks in using the Infra red port by the receptionist’s desk. The hospital server authenticates Ed and pulls up his old patient history and his appointment details and transmits it to the Doctor’s PDA with a message that his patient has arrived. The doctor examines Ed and writes a prescription for him on his PDA which is delivered electronically to Ed’s PDA and pharmacist.

As Ed is leaving after the visitation, he uses his e-wallet application to transfer the $10 co-payment fee to the hospital. The application transfers the money but warns Ed that he only has $5 worth of cash left on in his e-wallet. On the way to the pharmacy store to pick up his medication, Ed stops by his bank, plugs in his PDA on the cradle next to the ATM and transfers $100 to his e-wallet. He then proceeds to the pharmacy, identifies himself using his PDA, pays for the medication and reaches back to his office all in time for his appointment with the company CIO. 

Why mobilize

If you thought that the mobile hospital example was nothing but a dream and far from reality, think again. E-physician.com has a product that enables a significant portion of the capabilities described above. Over 250 Rochester area physicians use Palm powered handhelds to instantly identify specialists, look up drug interactions and refer to treatment guidelines and HMO policies.  (Blue Cross Blue Shield of the Rochester area – www.palm.com.) There is an entire web site called PDAMD.com that focuses on PDA applications for the healthcare industry. Examples abound of other players, some of which we will discuss briefly, who are harnessing the power PDA applications are creating to drive towards higher operational efficiencies and better customer experience. 

The reasons for mobilization of your work force can be grouped into two central and overarching themes: A mobile workforce will help you i) Serve your customers better and ii) Serve your customers cheaper. As a result of increases in revenues and decreases in costs, PDA solutions add significantly to your bottom line and pay for themselves.

Serve the customer better:

Never before in the history of business have the customers wielded as much as power as they do today. For companies to be successful in today’s information economy they will need to do much better than meeting customer’s expectations. Those who will prevail will the ones who delight the customer, creating needs where none exist and fulfilling them better than the others. Let’s look at some opportunities that fall in this arena: 

·          Mobile Customer Relationship Management (m-CRM)

Most of the Fortune 500 companies have invested or have plans to invest millions of dollars in CRM packages in the coming years. By collating information from various customer touch points with the company and providing al the information about it’s customers in the hands of the front line workers, CRM packages enable the company to provide it’s customers with personalized. But, when your front line employees leave your premises to visit customer sites, often their connections to the central repositories of customer information which you have some collected and built are severed. Even in many cases, where they are armed with laptops, there are many circumstances where it is not reasonable to sit down and power up a notebook, ex. at  a shipping and receiving dock or at a grocery store aisle. With Mobile CRM solutions offered by numerous CRM vendors in collaboration with PDA device manufactures, you can reclaim those connections. Your mobile workers must be able to access corporate data and applications at any time, at all customer touch points, in what ever service they are providing (Selling, Field service, Treatment, Service delivery or Training). Analysts International offers a good case study of one such deployment.  (For more on Analysts International, visit – www.palm.com.)    Today, its workforce has mobile access to a host of groupware, CRM applications and other core business systems. Earlier to access group databases, mobile sales team and managers had to start up their laptops and dial into firm’s network. Since dial up was not always convenient, often meetings proceeded without data and decisions were postponed. Now all that information relevant to them is on their PDAs.  

·          Improve Quality of Service by reducing errors –

Many front line employees despite the advances in automation and computing for one or more reasons, use paper forms to capture information. Errors creep up as this information is keyed into information systems leading to wrongly filled orders, delays and customer angst. In any operation where inspections are frequent, you will find that errors can be significantly be reduced by getting rid of paper and streamlining your processes. But more on that later in the next section on serving the customer cheaper. Healthcare offers a good example of an industry where errors can be fatal. Each year, more than 100,000 fatalities occur due to preventable medication errors; another approximately two million injuries occur due to mistakes in the medication process. Today, hospitals can deploy the Rx System developed by BD systems (www.bd.com)  which allows healthcare providers to access vital information about medication dosage and potential drug/drug interactions before administering a drug.

 Total annual cost of inefficiencies and errors equates to > $4B

Source: www.bd.com 

·          Respond to customer requests faster

In his paper “Time based competition”, George Stalk (Harvard Business Review, July 1988) argues that time has become a strategic source of competitive advantage in today’s world. Your ability to quickly respond to customer needs is a key measure of their satisfaction with your service. Often when your mobile employees are facing customers, they find themselves not armed with the existing inventory, pricing and other product specific information that the customer might be interested in. Often these requests get routed to sales support or engineering groups who collect this information (one or more week delays are frequent) and provide it to the customer. In the time that it takes you to respond, someone else better armed with this information could steal the customer away by giving the illusion of being more responsive when all they were, were better connected. You can arm your sales reps and other front line service employees with this information as well. One of the companies which has deployed an application to reduce response time is Fiat Credit France, (www.palm.com) which is the financial services arm of the global car giant fiat. Part of their product offering is a fairly complex but high value adding leasing offer called Formula which provides complementary services like extended guarantees, technical assistance, a replacement car for emergency use, an extended insurance policy and an option where Fiat guarantees to buy the car  back at a prearranged value after 24 months. With so many variable affecting the offer, Sales Reps needed an un- obtrusive way to access this complex information without leaving the customer, the car or the showroom floor. Today  after the deployment of a form based application, they can access price and model list data, financing information and current promotions all at the touch of the button. 

·          Provide new value added services

The technology available today provides businesses with many ways to delight the customer and differentiate their product offering from the competition by providing value added services. Many players in the content distribution and financial services are already taking advantage of these and creating WAP version of their web-sites which can be served over mobile information appliances, ranging from cell phones to PDAs. Many companies have significantly reduced their customer service costs and made it easier for check account status and make payment arrangements over the web. Taking the web enablement one step further and providing the capability to access this data on PDA devices will allow you to move towards the outer circle of Levitt’s value enhancing product model. Fidelity investments and CNN are just some examples of how companies are using the mobile computing technologies to better serve their customer base and delight them. In fact, Fidelity is know to give it’s it’s most valued customers with free Palm VIIs and internet enabled phones they can use to execute instant trades or check on their portfolios no matter where they are.  

Having seen several examples in which businesses have used PDA technologies “to serve the customer better” let’s now investigate some of the ways in which this technology can enable you to do the above and at the same time drive operational efficiencies through your enterprise.