Situation: Our client, a Fortune 1000 manufacturing company, was looking to replace the technology stack they had been using for the past 20 years to support their 15,000 merchandisers who work across retailers in North America. Due to their requirements for in-store work, their solution necessitated support for high volume bar code scanning and occasionally connected processing.
Response: Our team conducted a viability study to evaluate consumer grade smartphones based solution against ruggedized commercial devices and a more mature system architecture, for usage in the field. Once the enterprise aligned around consumer grade solutions, our team helped the client’s IT department select the best mobile enterprise application platform, develop a reference architecture implementation, build out the development capabilities to create and maintain mobile applications across the enterprise and select the appropriate consumer mobile devices for supporting the field service team.
Value: The outcome of the viability study demonstrated the ability of a smartphone based solution to meet the service level, scalability and offline processing requirements as well as ruggedized devices, while providing greater flexibility and a lower total cost of ownership.
As a result of our platform selection and reference architecture definition, the client was able to select and deploy a scalable solution which could support their offline processing and synchronization needs and create a reusable framework which would drive efficiency, consistency and best practice utilization across all of their future mobile implementations.
Furthermore, by evaluating staffing models, our team was able to help the client select a model for staffing a mobility center of excellence, which could build and maintaining mobile solutions across the enterprise at the lowest total cost of ownership without sacrificing the quality and/or the ability to scale capacity.
Finally, by helping the client evaluate mobile device form factors, and accessories such as Bluetooth scanners and cases, we were able to drive the selection of the ideal configuration based on usability, accuracy and productivity considerations.
