Preparing For a Mobile Future
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Presented by: Mat Brogie Property managers and field personnel now have access to applications and data that are more productive, deliver better customer service, are better informed, and can respond more quickly to changes in their operating environment. Tune in as panelists share their insights on the trends, impacts and factors to consider when developing a mobile strategy! Watch the webinar on-demand: http://be.buildingengines.com/Mobile-Property-Manager-Webinar-OnDemand-Reg.html
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Preparing For a Mobile Future
- 2. Register for the complete series at www.buildingengines.com! Sarah Fisher sfisher@buildingengines.com Director, Marketing & Communications Building Engines
- 3. Duke Long Matt Brogie Paul Wubbolts Broker/Owner of Founder of Director of Duke Long MobilityCIO Information Agency. Systems, CREIT Duke has over 15 years of commercial Mat has over 25 years of business Paul spearheads business process real estate experience creating land, process experience, with over 12 and system initiatives for a diversified redevelopment, multi-family, industrial, years focused on creating strategies portfolio or retail, industrial and office retail, office and medical commercial and solutions that leverage mobility properties across seven real estate deals. to make companies more effective geographical locations. and optimize work processes.
- 4. It’s all about differentiation.
- 5. How? 1. Service that is documented and assured. 2. More face-to- face time with Break free from your desk. tenants
- 6. Get your team’s data unlocked from their desktops Enable engineers to update, respond and resolve issues in the field
- 7. New mobile technology allows maintenance personnel to: • View instructional videos • Update task steps • View equipment history …from anywhere in the field!
- 9. Building A Building B
- 10. Answer any question a client might have on the spot: • Lease details • Maintenance history • Building stats • Etc.
- 11. • Standardization across portfolios and geographic regions • Mobile access to company resources • On-the-go access to asset and equipment maintenance information
- 12. “Businesses that don’t have a mobile strategy are falling behind because they’re not meeting the expectations of their workers or customers.” People expect information that is • Instantly accessible • Real-time
- 13. Ask: How many issues are your employees resolving per day? Mobility means more work orders processed more quickly Ask: What are the issues being reported? Can they be avoided? Improve communication between tenants and employees
- 14. Start by implementing a mobile extension of your existing systems
- 15. 1. Online vs. Offline Capabilities 2. Multimedia Capabilities
- 16. Data requirements Costs Storage wars: Personal vs. corporate devices
- 17. With a robust system… If you go offline, data synchronization should proceed where it left off when you come back online.
- 18. Return on Investment 1. Productivity 2. Tenant Satisfaction 3. Preventive Maintenance
- 19. • Select: an operational system i.e. a property management system • Prioritize: your goals/motivators i.e. Flexible service Real-time work order capture Actionable data intelligence • Consider: mobility will improve your team’s productivity
- 20. 1. Technology: Hardware independence/flexibility
- 21. 2. The Application 3. User Groups
- 22. 4. Service Delivery Assurance & Tenant Satisfaction
- 23. What kind of mobile equipment will you use? Whatever works best in your environment: Tablets Smartphones Purpose-built mobile devices
- 24. The key to implementation of mobile device applications? Making users understand the purpose of the mobile platform Getting the entire organization on the same page
- 25. Communication Application Usability Similarity to Popular Applications
- 26. - Start with small and useful application areas - Work from previous capabilities and then expand to new ones - Decide on equipment strategy - Ensure effective adoption
- 27. Duke Long Matt Brogie Paul Wubbolts Broker/Owner of Founder of Director of Duke Long MobilityCIO Information Agency. Systems, CREIT Duke has over 15 years of commercial Mat has over 25 years of business Paul spearheads business process real estate experience creating land, process experience, with over 12 and system initiatives for a diversified redevelopment, multi-family, industrial, years focused on creating strategies portfolio or retail, industrial and office retail, office and medical commercial and solutions that leverage mobility properties across seven real estate deals. to make companies more effective geographical locations. and optimize work processes.
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. Today’s webinar topic is building operations performance management.
- Sarah: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. Today’s topic is preparing for the not so distant mobile future- must-have mobile strategies for today’s property manager. My name is Sarah Fisher, Director of Marketing Communications at Building Engines, and we are sponsoring today’s presentation. This Webinar is part of our webinar masters series, where we bring you a detailed look at specific technology enabled best practices for commercial real estate operations, at no charge to you.
- Sarah:We’ll explore these questions with answers from our industry experts today. We have three guests with us who bring different perspectives on mobility in property and facility management today, and we’ll be talking to them in a roundtable format.First, we have Mat Brogie who is the principle consultant and founder of Mobility CIO. Mat and his team regularly consult and help companies develop mobile strategies, by taking projects from conception through deployment and even continued support. Our second guest is Duke Long. Duke is the broker/owner of Duke Long Agency and has over 15 years of commercial real estate experience creating land, redevelopment, multi-family, industrial, retail, office and medical commercial real estate deals. He is also a CRE social media and technology powerhouse-with over 3000 followers on twitter! Our third guest is Paul Wubbolts. Paul is Director of Information systems for CREIT Management, the oldest REIT in Canada! He spearheads business process and system initiatives for a diversified portfolio or retail, industrial and office properties across seven geographical locations. We also have prepared content on in-depth subjects including how to approach the decisions around devices and what future developments in mobility should you be thinking about --- we know you have team members that you would want to share this content with so we have put it all in a mobility resource center that we will be sharing with you later in the webinar.
- Sarah:Let’s start by ask how you see mobility fitting with the property management business today. Matt: The high value, property management space where we’re talking about large scale commercial properties with high value clientele, there’s a struggle going on with property managers to really differentiate themselves as they differentiate their properties and one of the way’s they’re doing that is by leveraging-up the amount of service they provide and the level of service they provide to their tenants.
- Matt:One of the areas that’s kind of key that’s been growing over the last five years is the ability to measure and provide service level agreements on the types of services that these property managers are providing to those tenants. So for example, committing to getting response times to certain types of issues and getting those issues resolved within a certain amount of time or getting them escalated in certain amounts of time and that’s one major area. The other is just interaction with and the relationship between the property management executives and the tenants, so the property managers don’t want to behind their desks and in their office. They want to be out and about with the tenants in the common areas, have a meeting with tenants and whatnot.
- Matt: So the need to do two things; one, to get the data unlocked from the desktop and available to be accessed by management on one hand so while they’re patrolling the building and out meeting with tenants, they can have answers to all questions at their fingertips. Then, for the building engineers and the people that actually respond to specific work requests and service requests and what-not, being able to track precisely when they responded, how they responded, and significantly reducing the amount of time it takes to respond and resolve issues, that’s another area. By putting information about those calls, by alerting engineers about issues that come up, they can greatly reduce the response times and increase the level of service to their clientele.Those things help the management and maintenance of the physical plant become much more efficient and mobile definitely helps that area as well.
- Sarah: OK so you’ve hit on most of our business hot buttons. What has changed that might be making mobile a more practical consideration today. Matt: You know, everybody, every industry is trying to do more with less and the ability to maintain the equipment that runs the building, the physical plant, the building in the most efficient way possible is something where mobile can really help. A lot of the power that’s now available in mobile devices that wasn’t available three or four or five years ago enables these guys to be able to do things like watch videos of the exact procedure for maintaining a particular piece of equipment. Giving the ability to very rapidly go through service checklists on things. Have them be able to be notified and alerted of specific tasks that are coming due or are overdue and having that happen while the guys were out and about and not having to have to refer to reports or things like that.
- Sarah: Let’s bring in Duke Long – Duke what are you thinking about as you listen to this discussion about why mobility? Duke: So let’s use that example with two office buildings in New York one right next to each other. Which building has the most value? If there’s building A that has all the BIMP, all the data, all real time data right there ready to go for a potential buyer or user and building B next to it that has maybe some or a little bit or none, which one are you picking? Most likely the one that creates not so much the most data but the true and accurate data so you can make a really good assessment about do I want to own the structure? Do I want to occupy the structure? How am I managing this structure? You know what life cycle does this structure have for every system within it? So that’s how that data set is so valuable. And in my opinion people will pay a lot for that. And that doesn’t mean other buildings don’t have value but that’s how that thing becomes you know, again, data A, gold, because of the way it was built, the way it was structured, and the way it’s been managed and/or well, managed basically over a period of time.
- Duke: So let’s use that example with two office buildings in New York one right next to each other. Which building has the most value? If there’s building A that has all the BIMP, all the data, all real time data right there ready to go for a potential buyer or user and building B next to it that has maybe some or a little bit or none, which one are you picking? Most likely the one that creates not so much the most data but the true and accurate data so you can make a really good assessment about do I want to own the structure? Do I want to occupy the structure? How am I managing this structure? You know what life cycle does this structure have for every system within it? So that’s how that data set is so valuable. And in my opinion people will pay a lot for that. And that doesn’t mean other buildings don’t have value but that’s how that thing becomes you know, again, data A, gold, because of the way it was built, the way it was structured, and the way it’s been managed and/or well, managed basically over a period of time.
- Sarah:Duke, you also work with the brokerage side of the property management business. How do you see this data you’re talking about help brokers, or the ability to attract new tenants?Duke:I think there’s an opportunity for a building owner who has a portfolio of 30 buildings to create a data package that goes well along just that basic set that the brokers going to have. That, to me, would be incredibly helpful because, again, one of the biggest things that it does it helps that building compete against the other building. [ Why if you have, if you’re a broker and you got client A with three warehouses they’re just three boxes, right? Maybe they are and there are little bit of factors that go in there again, door height, the location, but how about if two of those things have none of that data and the other is this is how efficient it is. This is how the systems been working. This is all the data we have maintenance wise.] That gives that broker a compelling reason to look at his client and go look at all this stuff. I mean, yeah, they did a roof they had to redo a roof because an A/C went out three years ago but here’s all the maintenance on that. Other than yeah, I think they did something a couple years ago. And, you know, again, that’s exactly the parts that they could use to make that building a more competitive and valued building. It’s been there for years.
- Paul: I think if we think of mobility certainly in the context of real estate companies, really it all speaks to that access information. We have a staff complement of about 150 employees. With those employees we manage 200 properties in our portfolio and the majority of us are working out of regional offices or a head office so a lot of the buildings that we manage are at a distance to the organization. Certainly for our maintenance staff these individuals are often on the road. They’re on the premises for these properties and they’re disconnected from the main sort of, I guess, systems and sources of information for the company. So to bridge that disconnect really there is a need for technology to render that, the resources of the company accessible to those employees that are on the road. Those types of employees, there are two different types that are out there. There are the maintenance personnel or operational staff charged with the day-to-day care of the buildings. We also have leasing staff so this would be our sales force and these individuals also tend to be out on the road a fair bit, obviously trying to sell our available space. So those two constituent groups are really the prime beneficiaries of mobile solutions or mobile information. Sarah: Can you take us back inside your decision process and kind of step us through the different stages and any insights you can share
- Sarah:So Mat, net it out for us, how do you see the risk reward situation today? Mat:So businesses that don’t have a mobile strategy today, that are ignoring it or waiting until it just happens by itself, are the ones that are falling behind because they’re not meeting the expectation of their workers or their customer constituents that are expecting them to be able to respond to things, to answer questions, to get things resolved. the technologies have evolved and people’s expectations have evolved right in line with the technological capability to where people expect to have answers to questions immediately and expect to have access to whatever information they need to resolve a problem or address an issue. They expect to have that available to them instantly. The days are gone where we expect people to get back to us with an answer and instead, the expectation now is that we can answer everything in real-time through the use of hyper-connectivity that we have access to.
- Question to set up: What Indicators Should Someone Look for that indicate it could be the right time for mobility solution (4) Mat007 1:40 secs So some of the things that I’ve seen as I’ve gone and done what I refer to as ride-alongs sometimes or walk-alongs when you’re talking to property management, one is just the efficiency of the building workers. So there is a KPI around, a key performance indicator around the number of issues that can be resolved by one worker per day and if that number is not going down over time, then that’s a very clear indicator that you’re not taking advantage of technologies like mobile to help that worker become more efficient. In the old days, you know, two years ago or three years ago, it was not uncommon at all for maintenance workers in buildings to report back to a central office on a regular basis and go to a fax machine or a printer and pick-up paper-based jobs out of that queue, out of that stack of papers to determine what work that they had to do and then make their way up or down 20, 30 floors or across the campus to resolve that issue. Then going back and picking up another piece of paper for a new issue that’s come in. With mobility, it’s very easy to just dispatch jobs to lots of people. Their phone will buzz or beep, alert them somehow that they have a new job and they can go from job to job to job without having to go back and forth to the office. So that’s one key thing. It’s the efficiency of your building maintenance people improving over time or isn’t it. Mat08a 1:20 secs Another one is the types of issues that you get, issues or complaints that you get from tenants. If tenants are complaining at all about not knowing whether an issue is resolved, if you’re getting calls into the property management office, asking about when an issue is going to be resolved, if it’s been addressed, what was done to complete an issue, or questioning even billing that happens against -- billable issues that get resolved by the property management office. If you’re getting a lot of those kinds of calls, then you’re probably not doing enough to improve the communication between the people that work on the issues and the tenants. So things like giving them the ability, in-hand, to, for example, take a picture of work when it was completed, mark a work order complete, and have that generate a message back to the tenant that work that they had requested was done, the number of calls that you get from your tenants over time should be going down as well, allowing property managers to focus more on being able to build relationships with their tenants and focus on the more positive pieces.
- Sarah: So let’s talk about how an organization would go about setting up a mobile strategy, making the key decisions that determine a strategy. Mat: I think once people are educated and understand what it takes to get started with mobility, what the low hanging fruits is that they can address very easily, then they’re eager to get going and move forward with it, but until they understand the process and remove some of that, remove some of the unknowns, until they get to the point where they’ve removed some unknowns, they’re hesitant to move forward.Sarah: So what’s the best way to start? Definitely start with systems that you already have in place. If you’ve got a work order management system that already offers some mobile solution, mobile extension, it may only cover 70 percent of what your ideal solution has, but it’s probably a great place to start and the example I’ll give is if your work order management system only has a web-enable mobile solution, you may not be able to run that in the basement, but it may be very, very easy for you to get up and running on all other scenarios when you’re not out of connectivity and it’s a very good first step to take and it’s a very good way to prove the investment, that you’ll get a return on the investment of implementing that mobile.
- Ok, you’re on a role, keep going. (20) Re: Online vs. Offline Capability Mat027a 1 min One is online versus offline capability. So you create a web-based application that people can access through their browsers on their devices. The plus to that is it gives you a wide range of devices that you can access the application on. The downside is if you don’t have connectivity, you don’t have the application and in the case of building maintenance it’s surprising, but in large cities, connectivity is often worse than it is in a suburban area. So you’ve got canyon effects in cities. You’ve got people working in basements. You’ve got people working very high in tall buildings where connectivity is very spotty. So if it’s important for users to be able to access data while they don’t have connectivity, it’s a very different issue and you need to make that a high priority factor when you’re deciding on the application. OPTIONAL CAN BE CUT FOR TIME Mat027b :40 secs Another (consideration) is push notifications and alerts. So is it important for your users to get notified without going to look for information? So a high priority service request comes in either from a high priority client or from a high priority type issue, do you want the device to be able to notify the user by vibrating or beeping or, you know, providing something else? Or is your application, is it only important that the user check their phone every 15 minutes or half an hour to see if new work has been assigned to them. So what capabilities are there as far as the notification of work goes? Mat027c 1 min Another (consideration) one is going to be multimedia capabilities. Is it important to be able to do things like attach photos of problems found, attach photos of work that’s been completed, on the back-end to be able to attach work instructions in various formats be they documents or videos, images, spreadsheets, checklists, whatever else? Is it important to be able to attach those kinds of multimedia to the work as the work is being sent out to people and have them be able to have access to that? That plays also into the availability online and offline. If I’m in a basement, do I need to be able to view an instruction sheet as to how to change a filter on a particular piece of equipment when you’re out of coverage? So multimedia capabilities.
- Sarah: What other key areas need to be considered, or are criteria for making effective decisions. Mat: Another consideration would be data usage. So the volumes of data that are moving back and forth between the back-end and the phone and what that does to plans. You know, a person’s data plan on their phone, a typical plan will cover two gigabytes of data and typically that’s enough for an average user unless they’re watching a lot of videos or streaming a lot of music or things like that. In the corporate world, that’s typically more than enough for the kind of work that needs to be done. However, the trends over the last few years are along the order of data usage is doubling year over year for people and the type of data that is being used is shifting. In the past, several years ago, data was text and emails. Then it started to be photos and web access. And just this past year, over 50 percent of data usage was accounted for by videos. So as we’re looking at things like attaching multimedia to work orders and feedback to tenants in this case by attaching photos to work that’s been completed, the data usage has to be a consideration as well. So there are strategies that can be implemented. [ So ] at the same time the data usage requirements are going up, the costs are going down. I think that’s a trend to continue to watch to see if one of those accelerates faster and to, you know, to make the decisions based on the business value of the types of media that are attached to work and the types of data that’s being moved back and forth. Look at the business value that that provides versus the cost, recognizing that the cost is coming down over time.
- Sarah: So it sounds like given the role of mobility for property managers and building engineers, not just as a communication device, but also a portable information and even document support device, being able to collect and transmit data is important. Could you expand on that a little more. Mat: If you’re going to support offline for your application, make sure that you thoroughly vet the environment that you’re going to be running in and the kind of data transactions that will happen while you’re offline. Again, in the property management space, particularly when you’re talking about in cities and in larger buildings, it’s not just a clear black and white, I’m online or I’m offline. There are a lot of near-online situations where you’re online for a minute and you’re offline for a minute and then you’re back online again. So the system has to be robust enough to handle those situations. If I’ve been offline for an hour and I’ve completed four or five work orders and I’ve attached some photos to those work orders and I’ve included a bunch of notes about the work that I’ve done and then I come back into connectivity for a few seconds and I’m back out again, the system has to be robust enough to know that only some of the data transferred and that it needs to continue to transfer the data when you come back in and online. So that’s a very key issue.
- Sarah:For any business decision maker, return on investment is key to any decision. As compelling as you make the requirement, and as attractive the practicality of the technology, it has to work from a financial perspective. Talk with us about ROI – return on investment. Mat: The actual investment in the mobile components of these solutions is actually very small. Most of these companies have already in place work order management systems, work management systems, service management systems with their preventive maintenance tasks that they need to do. So extending that out to the field, particularly with a BYOD strategy where you’re allowing people to use their own phones means that the investment in making that move is not necessarily a great one, particularly if the vendor of the software that you’re using for your work management already has mobile modules. There’s very little investment actually. The return, even if there were a substantial investment, the return is very easily measured and recouped through two main areas. One, working productivity. So being able to get the same amount of work done with five guys as opposed to seven guys because now they are very efficiently moving from job to job. They’re very efficiently communicating about the jobs that they have to work on and not having to come back to a central location, not having to come back at the end of the day with a stack of paperwork and keying in to a system all of the updates to what they’ve done. That’s one area where there is very direct and very measurable impact in mobility. Another area is in the tenant satisfaction area. You can publish higher tenant satisfaction numbers. Two things will happen. One, you’re retain tenants longer and two, you’ll be able to attract more tenants and fill more vacancies quicker. OPTIONAL CAN BE CUT FOR TIME Mat011b 1:4019. There is probably a third area as well. That’s with if you’ve got a very strong handle on your preventive maintenance for building systems and building infrastructure, being able to, on a very regular and very predictable basis, maintain that equipment. It extends the life cycle of that equipment, reducing the amount of capital investment that you have to make replacing systems prematurely and having a system that includes mobility where the building engineers at any time will see the list of the issues that they need to resolve in the moment. If they ever find themselves at a point where they’ve got an extra 45 minutes between jobs that they weren’t planning on, they’ll have data in their hands for being able to focus on those kind of preventive maintenance jobs. When they get to those preventive maintenance jobs, if they’ve got a good mobile application with them, that application will tell them the exact steps that need to be taken. It will allow them to create new issues to resolve, things that they find while they’re doing their preventive maintenance, and it may even give them specific instruction through pages in a manual that have been scanned-in and sent to a mobile device or videos that have been attached to that task to let them know exactly the steps that they need to take, improving the maintenance on the building systems and thereby driving down the costs of continuing to operate the building.
- Paul: I think the first solution that I would talk about in terms of our decision process would be our operational system, which is a building management system. This type of technology has been available for quite some time in the industry. Such a system would allow us to be - - to deliver the service in a flexible manner. You would have to, absolutely have to be a mobile technology allowing our personnel to operate freely wherever they are and would allow us to coordinate activities between dispatch offices. In our case we needed the flexibility allowing such a solution to allow for multiple centers or dispatch centers to operate in the various regions. So certainly the type of solution was important to us, but very much so also the need to offer a [Crete] specific type of service and one that would allow us to establish our standards in the way that we wanted to deliver them. So that is the - - were the motivators for us. For sure we also needed to put a formal system in place to get a better understanding of how we deliver our services, and now I’m speaking more to the feedback mechanism that such a mobile solution provides. Now giving a field operator the ability to capture information right on the site and the information would be captured and stored in the database for reporting so another aspect of this was really to allow [Crete] to build on it’s experience and allow for continuous improvement by this feedback mechanism. Finally the efficiency of being in continuous contact with our operators would allow us to achieve more or, I guess, provide a greater level of service for our personnel. So in a nutshell, the application, the mobile solution was really a tool for increasing productivity for our personnel.
- Sarah: Now in terms of the mobile aspects itself, any specific insights in terms of how to go about - - what decision criteria? What factors to look at and perhaps that you looked at as you decided what is it that we need to put in place? Paul: Well there are three parts to that. From a technology perspective we wanted to make sure that the mobile solutions selected would allow a certain amount of flexibility or versatility in terms of not tying us to any specific piece of hardware. The - - presently we’re very much committed to Blackberry’s, smart phones. There’s a certain level of security that we like with a hardware platform but we certainly did not want to become overly reliant on that one technology so a mobile solution for us would be one that accommodated all types of mobile technologies such as tablets, such as smart phones and also just remote desktops. Many of our personnel would complete their work at home or wherever they may be. So that hardware independence is a big factor and the delivery of the solution that we selected really is accommodated through the internet so really as long as our hardware complies to browser requirements then this solution works fine and we’re not encumbered.
- The application itself is another area of - - that was very important as a factor. We wanted an application that did multiple things. Part of it, which was very important for us, is a very strong, what we call, a preventative maintenance module. This speaks more to the maintenance cycles that all of our installed equipment must go through, things such as periodic maintenance for HVAC systems, for elevators, safety systems and whatnot. So the solution that we looked at had to be strong in those two areas specifically. Finally, there were other administrative aspects to managing properties such as ensuring that we have a proper contact database associated with each of the properties. Therefore the ability to capture names of tenant personnel and that, of course, is important not only in the - - in our ability to interact with them or receive requests from tenants but also for us to contact them in the case of emergencies. So again, the solution becomes much more comprehensive in nature when you’re looking at all the different ways people interact with it. It’s not just the field personnel. It’s also our tenants and it’s our head office dispatch personnel.
- Separate slide - Surveys We actually were looking for even more out of the solution. We wanted to get satisfaction surveys built as part of this solution so that we can close the loop in terms of being able to assess how we did in delivering our service and also we would be able to use the survey system to track or to manage other programs which is life safety programs to do periodic check ups on properties for environmental risks. So really I think if I can sort of put it all in one, we wanted a solution that would perform all aspects of managing a property but also very much has sort of a glue that keeps us connected to our tenants and our personnel, our field personnel and our head office personnel and to deliver that through a mobile app makes it a very powerful solution for us.
- Sarah: What about the mobile equipment that will actually be deployed?Mat:Then the third area is, you know, what is the mobile equipment that you’re going to put out into the field? That will be dependent on a few things. You’ll need to look at putting the mobile devices in the hands of the workers that are going to address their needs the best. There is some areas where tablets make good sense. There are other areas where purpose-built, ruggedized mobile devices make sense. Then there are other areas where, you know, standard kind of consumer grade smart phones are a very good option. For example, a property manager that runs the building is probably going to be better suited to walk around with a tablet where they can get access to whatever information they need to from the back-end and they can create content. They can type in emails, they can type in incident reports, they can write things up and create new service requests and things like that while they’re walking around the building. Whereas, a building engineer that primary focuses on responding to service requests from customers, from tenants, he’s probably going to want to work off of something that, you know, fits in his hand, that buzzes when something new that happens, where his interactions are typically picking items from a list and what-not. A phone would probably be a better solution for him.
- Sarah: OK, what other key areas impact successful implementation? 26. (18) Re: Implementation (continued – deploy applications) Mat025 1:40 R: Once you’ve addressed those things, then you have to think about how do you get the application up and running and live and permeated throughout your organization? Again, I’m a proponent of start small, so grab a pilot set of users and a pilot set of functions and start in a very controlled way to get those things out there. Another key thing to consider is the adoption by the workers of the mobile, of having mobile as part of their job now. Some workers will get concerned now that, you know, big brother is watching because now I can see when exactly I do things and, in some cases, where I am when I’m doing those things if they use a GPS and what-not. So very communication with the users up-front to let them know it’s coming, to let them know why it’s coming, and really selling to them the benefits that they’re going to get from using mobility, being able to get their jobs done more efficiently, being able to get answers to questions in real-time as opposed to having to wait to get things done, so there should be an ongoing program, as you bring mobility in, to educate the users about the benefits that they’re going to be receiving and about the benefits, you know, the benefits to the overall organization as well to promote that adoption.
- Sarah: You mention adoption. As a software company, we’re fanatical about adoption. Besides communication what are key success factors for adoption? Mat: The primary gate to really good adoption is really good usability of the application itself. If users get the new application in their hands and don’t immediately know how to use it without having to be trained, there’s a high likelihood that they’re not going to explore that application for all of its capabilities or not make an effort at all to try and use it. People are afraid to try new things and to teach themselves new things, so the user interface design, the user experience design of the application is a key factor. It’s very important that any applications, any mobile applications that you put in place that you expect people to use on their smart phones that behave like other smart phone applications that they’re already use to using. You shouldn’t try to invent new ways to interact with your phone for the application. You should look at other, very popular applications that are available that people use quite a bit and mimic those kinds of interaction styles.
- Sarah:OK, so implementation key points were: Start with a small but useful application area. You named three: work order management, property manager support and maybe preventive maintenance management. Work from the capabilities your systems provider has as a starting point, even if it might not provide all you want at this point. It can at least help demonstrate the value, and start you up the learning curve. Decide on your equipment strategy: whether to deployed company purchased devices or to support a BYOD or bring your own device strategy. Plan to insure effective adoption. Beyond communicating the purpose of the program, you mentioned application usability as the primary gate to really good adoption.
- Sarah: Gentlemen, at this point I want to open to questions from our audience today.