MOBILE APPLICATIONS - Infomation anywhere, anytime
In the past, the only staff that most companies had that spent much of their time out of the office would be field technicians who would go to a site to make a repair, then go back to their home-base when done. Knowledge workers would be in the office, where they could use their desktop computer to get immediate access to the information they require.
However, in today’s world, a large percent of employees are road warriors who spend a large chunk of their time out of the office. This includes the following:
- Company executives, who need information on customers they are about to visit
- Sales agents, who need access to company programs, offers, forms, and so on
- Operations executives, who need to be notified immediately of problems requiring their attention
- Brokers, who need to be notified immediately of changes in the stock market that could affect their clients
- Field technicians, who need access to repair instructions and safety warnings, as well as information on their next service call
Even though they are not at their desk, these people need access to the information to do their job just as much (if not more so) than before.
VisionMAX has created solutions to support these requirements in the following ways:
- Accessing data on a company’s legacy systems to make it accessible on a PDA (e.g., BlackBerry, Palm)
- Creating an application that resides on a PDA that interacts directly with data on a company’s host system
- Using the automated scheduler feature of VisionEngine to issue e-mails and text messages to a user’s PDA or cell phone to notify them of an event on either a pre-scheduled basis (e.g., status report snapshot) or when a threshold is reached
Another force driving anywhere, anytime access is the desire of many companies to give their customers access to functions to manage the service they receive, no matter where they are.
An application that VisionMAX built for a leading North American satellite TV operator provided their subscribers with the ability to use a BlackBerry application to activate or deactivate their subscription (e.g., for going on vacation or going to the cottage).
VisionMAX is also developing an application that will enable subscribers to use their BlackBerry to access an electronic program guide (EPG) of shows that will be on that evening, and then set their personal video recorder (PVR) to record a particular program if they know they won’t be there to watch.
