A Beginners Guide to Enterprise Mobility and ERP
by admin
Having mobility in your workforce, particularly in certain vertical sectors such as manufacturing, retail and logistics is no longer something that gives you a competitive edge, it’s a competitive necessity. Similarly, the vast majority of medium sized businesses also utilise the benefits of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to optimize and improve their organisational processes and cut costs.
But how do you make ERP mobile? The image of the traditional ERP system doesn’t match with the transparent and simple slickness of buying a service through an online store on your smart phone. However, using Cloud computing technologies, today’s lower cost yet powerful mobile devices, and flexible, scalable software solutions, that image is becoming outdated.
This new set of technologies enable ERP with” Enterprise Mobility”.
Enterprise mobility is all about flexibility – providing easy access to information and processes to employees wherever they are located. It can encompass everything from the integration of mobile phones into a corporate telephone system to vertically oriented solutions involving the quick delivery of productivity enhancing information to people in the field, the factory, the warehouse, at cash registers and at patients’ bedsides, etc. Employees have to be able to stay in touch regardless of where they are and what the time is, so that a business can continue to be competitive.
Businesses regard enterprise mobility as a key investment because it can help them:
- Improve service quality levels – give mobile field representatives access to relevant functions and data so that they can deliver on-the-spot, real-time information to customers.
- Operate more efficiently – reclaim time previously lost to travel and connectivity issues, build deeper business relationships and improve productivity.
- Gain a competitive advantage – instant access to data, including pricing and inventory levels.
- Extend business borders and enter new markets – transact business where it happens, regardless of location or connectivity.
- Make employees more productive – with the increasing ubiquity and cost effectiveness of mobile technology the ability to access and work with essential information is now 24 x 7
Some examples of where organizations are gaining benefits from adoption of enterprise mobility include:
- Improve employee performance and increase their productivity by ensuring they have access to data from your ERP system at all times and in all locations. Great for workers on the go such as department supervisors that need to respond and adjust work as required; workers can receive alerts in real-time and perform lookups straight away, leading to improved productivity and less time wasted on labour scheduling.
- Improve inventory tracking: Use for labelling and scanning inventory to achieve optimum traceability and to make immediate adjustments during counting, leading to improved confidence in your enterprise data; you know your stock levels are accurate and can therefore make better business decisions when buying and selling products.
- Improve material handling: An operator or line supervisor can produce requests for business critical material or components on the fly, at any point during production, leading to maximised manufacturing flow; no waste, less errors, speedier delivery, saving money in the long term.
- Improve visibility on the plant floor: Use mobile solutions to track Work In Progress, eliminate the need to go back into large systems to search for products; find the products your customer need at the tip of your fingers and be confident that your delivery estimates to them will be accurate.
- Improve quality assurance: Records are kept of non conformances, inspection data, etc. so that quality can be assured throughout the whole production, not only inside the quality control room; and if a problem is identified, data can immediately be produced to aid the investigation.
- Manage and enhance business performance: Supervisors can receive monthly/daily/hourly key performance indicators to manage overall performance and make immediate adjustments if needed.
Making ERP Mobile
Mobile ERP offers organizations the option for lightweight access and ability to work with information within their ERP system through un-tethered wireless Web browsers, on a variety of common mobile devices such as, for example, a laptop, a BlackBerry, or an iPhone. With the rapid expansion of mobile devices, you should make sure that your ERP solution can handle deploying information and transactions to these devices seamlessly – for example using technology that allows ERP applications to run as smart clients or Web clients, or on mobile devices, all from the same source code. This will ensure that customization and user personalization remains intact, whatever the user interface.
As well as making general ERP applications available on mobile devices, some ERP vendors will have specific mobile solutions for departments that are very mobile-centric, for example:
- Handheld, MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) – support for on-premise / local mobile tools such as vehicle mounted PCs, rugged shop devices, handheld inventory tools, and barcode scanners.
- Field Service – Modern and robust mobile technology with purpose built applications for field-based teams. Provides both connected (wireless) and disconnected (local device storage) support with real-time or scheduled synchronization. Mobile field service gives field service engineers access to comprehensive role-specific functionality alongside synchronized enterprise resource planning (ERP) data. With it, users can:
- Receive and update rosters of service call jobs.
- Process service call jobs, tracking labour, inventory, materials and equipment in a configurable workflow.
- Specify OH&S, QA, customer approval forms using a simple graphical tool.
- Update service call status in ‘real-time’.
- Operate ‘offline’ on a local SQL database when not connection to Epicor.
- Manage schedule and allocation using the ‘Schedule and Dispatch’ option.
About The Author: Rashed Khan holds an MSc in Software Engineering and loves guest posting on Business/technology related topics. Click here to follow Rashed on Twitter.
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