Technology has radically changed the way businesses function. However, this upsurge of mobile technologies and the internet have had the most profound impact on all businesses. It is no accident that many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are waking up to the competitive advantage offered by mobility. Adaption of enterprise mobility has risen by almost 37% in the last three years, and the pace won’t be slowing down anytime soon. Enterprises across varied industrial sectors can now leverage the unwired freedom offered by mobile technologies and smart phones in practically all dimensions of businesses.
There are today, numerous industry and task specific mobile applications for enterprises across sectors. Be it logistics, supply chain management, financials to sales, all can benefit from mobile technologies. Enterprises as a whole can also gain a massive competitive advantage by the integrated use of mobile apps for all the aforementioned business processes. Quick access to relevant business information and faster response time results further in more efficient and streamlined operations. However, SMB’s need to consider the following three factors to effectively counter the challenges posed by enterprise wide mobility adaptations:
- Security Management: Many companies limit the use of mobile devices in the wake of security concerns. Although security risks is an important factor, but enterprises would lose out to their competition if mobility is restricted. In order to counter this, business leaders need to formulate security policies for effective mobility practices across their enterprise. This would typically incorporate device usage, data handling and reporting. In order for strict compliance of these security practices, the companies need to make use of technologies. Mobile device management solutions are one such effective way to enforce security practices and standardize its use across the enterprise. This can also take care of remote wiping of sensitive enterprise data in cases of lost or stolen devices.
- Cost Controlling: Cost of mobility is another area that concerns a lot of enterprise leaders. Adapting mobility may require upfront costs of tablets and smart phones along with the price for data usage. Bills especially become a concern due to executives and field service people travelling onsite, sometimes even internationally. Enterprises can adapt several strategies to control costs. Some of these include encouraging the BYOD culture. This restricthe upfront device costs. Configuring alerts in data intensive applications that warn about the expiry of data usage limits are also helpful in managing and controlling excessive data use by employees.
- Application Integration and Device Management: There are numerous applications for a specific purposes and processes. These apps need to work in synchronizations so as to provide better outcomes. For example a sales personnel checking stocks from an inventory app, while taking a customer order. In this case, the inventory app shows the real-time stocks details, which in turn would need to be updated from supply chain and warehouse applications. This back-end data sharing through various company data bases can be taken care by using a platform based mobility strategy (like SAP Mobile Platform). This would also solve the problem of supporting different mobile devices.
In conclusion therefore, if enterprises today acclimatize all the above listed strategies, the challenges of mobility adaptation would certainly be reduced. It would also bring in a lot of scalability to enterprise mobility practices. Check out our SAP Ebook to know more on these strategies in depth. Find out how enterprises can avoid any pitfalls and derive greater business values from adapting enterprise mobility.