M Berardi discusses key considerations for choosing mobile devices for field workforces. He notes the explosion of consumer electronics driving mobility product evolution and increased tablet use, as well as security concerns. Scale is a major challenge for implementing mobility solutions across a large company like FedEx in many countries. To overcome these challenges, FedEx tries to limit training/support to a small number of mobile devices and applications.

1. Choosing The Right Devices For Your Field Workforce
Matthew Berardi, Managing Director, Field Technology, Operations Technology & Systems
Support, FedEx Ground discusses the key criteria to take into consideration when choosing
mobile technology for the field workforce. Matthew also comments on the smartphone vs.
ruggedized device debate, and outlines how to overcome the challenge of managing multiple
mobile deployments across an enterprise.
IQPC Exchange: What are the key market trends impacting on your role?
M Berardi: For FedEx, specifically, when you look at the enterprise mobility space, there are
a couple of key trends in the market that are really current and impactful. I think one of the
biggest things is the explosion in consumer electronics in the mobility space, and what that’s
doing to drive the evolution of different mobile computing products, and the items that are in
the market available for us to adopt. Concurrent to that, we’ve seen an explosion in tablet
computing, and that’s also a concern for us as well as an opportunity to see where that fits in
our business from a white collar, grey collar, hourly professional, and then when you look at
those things combined, security is certainly a big factor, as well, in terms of enterprise access.
IQPC Exchange: What are the top challenges you’re facing in implementing mobility
solutions?
M Berardi: In implementing mobility solutions for a company as broad as FedEx, one of the
challenges is really always scale. We’re large enough that we really need to have some
boundaries on training end users, supporting end users, and being able to scale a small
select number of mobile computing devices and applications across a wide variety of users in
a number of countries. That’s really the biggest challenge for us.
IQPC Exchange: What are you doing to overcome these challenges?
M Berardi: For the most part, to overcome those challenges, one of the things we’ve tried to
do is...
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