The new speed of business requires more from management to keep pace. But keeping pace means they need business information at their fingertips, whether they’re at the desk or on the road. They need more than data— they need dashboards that deliver big-picture analytics in addition to transactional-level detail that they can drill into. Such a 360-degree view helps management visualize the business and see the inter-dependencies within the organization, while identifying how various transactional-level changes can affect larger outcomes.
Enable Faster, Better Business Decisions with Mobility
Is this need really new? No, but the way business is done today compared to 10 years ago certainly is. Customers demand more, want it faster and expect it for less. Employees demand better support and better access to systems. The market demands faster, better decisions, and with extreme competition in most industries, it’s a new requirement for success.
Real-time Intelligence with Speed
Customers and the consumer world are adapting relatively quickly to this new mobile paradigm, but large, complex organizations are challenged to adapt as quickly or effectively. But such access to real-time data combined with speed : not only in CPU processing time : but in response time, means even the largest organizations can become quick and nimble.
Think Out of the Box on What Mobility Can Deliver
An appsFreedom client is in the high-value goods industry, namely engineering and construction. Every project’s success and customer’s satisfaction (and lifetime customer value, frankly) is dependent on the on-time delivery of each phase as well as staying within the confines of a budget, and of course, the quality of final output.
But with so many dependencies and moving parts, such as inventory costs, resource scheduling, materials shipping and others, executives need to approve high-dollar requisitions to keep projects moving forward and on time. And what better way to manage all it all than by using smartphones and tablets while on the road or at a project site.
Today they are running appsFreedom, our ready-to-use suite of mobile apps for SAP, on their iPads and Smartphones. With these apps, management now has real-time access to projects, requisitions, status and all of the inter-dependencies between each component. Now they can truly make better, more informed business decisions faster than ever before.
The ROI of Faster, Better Decisioning
The other missing ingredient in enabling faster, better decision-making is understanding the true ROI of each decision, and the justifications behind every business move.
Gaining insight into how the business is impacted in time and expense savings by making faster, better business decisions can help the organization prioritize workflow steps and decisions into high impact, medium impact and low impact. Mobility takes time and money out of the process, while helping employees prioritize their time and focus.
For example, if 20-25% of activity is considered mission-critical, high impact decisions and 20-25% is low impact, that leaves 50-60% of medium impact decisions open for improvement. This is an often over-looked part of the business where tremendous gains can be recognized from an organizational shift to mobility.
Of course the million dollar question is how much would you pay to make those 50-60% of medium impact decisions faster and better, and what is that ROI to your business?
I’ve been asking people this very question for years now. From an Operations VP, I heard “if I can approve that purchase order in minutes instead of hours, then my production operations run smoothly and we gain big cost savings.”
I heard a Sales VP say “if I could approve the proposal in minutes, my sales guy could present it faster to the customer and beat our competitors in delivery time alone.” Clearly many sales opportunities can be won or lost based on the responsiveness of the front line process.
I heard a CFO say “I could spend more time looking forward if I had an accurate view of the business analytics in real-time and I could ask the right questions upfront during a month-end close or a year-end close.”
Mobility Value and ROI is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Model
I don’t think you can put a standard ROI on faster decisions. It clearly depends on where you sit in the organization, what industry you’re in and what kind of customers and market dynamics you face.
I do know that faster, better decision-making across the business world is quickly becoming a price to entry. I also see first-hand with our clients that the only limitation with how mobility can positively impact the business seems to be with people’s imaginations.
So what old ‘movies’ are you replaying in your mind that mobility can help rewrite a completely different — completely better — storyline?