Smartphones are quickly changing the way people are living their lives. We are spending more and more time on our phone and find them very handy for multitude of tasks – from catching up with friends to ordering food to booking cabs. A US adult spends approximately 3 hours per day1 on average, browsing on the smartphone as per the comScore Mobile Metrix, August 2016. However, the use of mobile in the workspace hasn’t picked up at the same rate. Employees are still using their phones only to check their mails primarily. Organizations are finding it difficult to integrate their office processes or convert their everyday work into this mobile movement.
Mobility in Industrial Sector
Industries like Manufacturing and automotive are moving towards digitization at a very fast pace. Mobile technology in every aspect from R&D to procurement to production to inspections to sales & service is the need of the hour. Industrial organizations are quickly shifting from production at a large scale to mass customization with product roll out cycles shrinking and customer expectations rising.
Most of the product roll-outs are happening using agile manufacturing processes with a test and learn principle. Once a first prototype is ready, the product team can get quick recommendations and feedbacks using mobile forms and then define the iterations based on the list of recommendations. In such times of rapid transformation, the importance of quick decision taking ability and fast information flow is undeniable.
Shifting from Paper to Mobile is inevitable
Manufacturing facilities and automobile parts manufacturers are still using paper forms or excel spreadsheets to carry out their research, testing and equipment inspections. Many man-hours are still spent in data entry and creating reports on this collected data. What if all this work could have been handled using smartphones and employees could get test results quickly and detect faults and point them out using mobile sensors? There are mobile automation tools in the market today which help you convert your paper or web based processes to form based applications within hours using drag and drop technology. With easy integration to your existing backends, easy reporting capabilities, mobile sensors and workflow support, all your data collection worries can be put to the past.
Shifting Focus to Mobility will bring Great Rewards
Your field services personnel, facility inspectors, equipment testing workers, technicians, inventory managers could be the first to embrace this mobile shift; with enhanced productivity being just the beginning of the manifold benefits. Some notable benefits of converting your paper/spreadsheet processes to mobile forms or apps would be:
- Superior Data Collection: Quality of data collected will be improved using mobile sensors like camera, GPS, image annotation, barcode scanner et al.
- Adaptability on the rise: With faster data processing, inspections and tests can be carried out faster and information exchange can be quicker making decision making easier.
- Cognitive Decision making: With natural language processing, chatbots, language translations and Artificial Intelligence features in the forms, alerts and assistance can be given to employees working on products as well as sales force.
- Iterative Production Process: Frequent evaluation of progress through feedback forms will allow for timely changes without considerable time delays in next cycle.
Transform your Manufacturing Industry with Mobility
Mobile can help you bridge the gap between disparate functions of your enterprise, ending silos and facilitating real-time collaboration. With ability to allocate work to different resources based on their responsibilities, industrial enterprises can create more nimble processes thus driving faster processes. Converting your data collection process to mobile at such a fast pace can help you created a connected and agile supply chain with speed being at the forefront of all your industrial processes. The mobile form automation would be an harbinger for the digital disruption that would transform your industrial enterprise.
