April/May 2003

These days pre-packaged mobile solutions are available to cut development costs, and rapid development tools offer an increasingly appealing half-way house. Sharon Clancy offers a beginners' guide

Two or three years ago, there was very little choice in the matter. If you were mobilising your workforce, you couldn't buy off-the-shelf applications for your portable devices because basically they didn't exist.

This meant that usually you had to confront some expensive and lengthy IT costs. You had to develop "forms" software (the interface your employees would use), and make it work on your choice of handheld. You had to get it right first time, too, because making changes was prohibitively complicated.

That's now changed. There are ready-made alternatives - and in particular, there is the rapid development approach, in which you can build the application you need without employing a team of IT professionals to do it for you.

 

Admittedly, this approach may not work for everyone. Other factors might tip the balance away from a ready-made application, including the questions of back-office integration and ERP compatibility, connectivity and security. Your in-house IT people might prefer to do their own thing. But many might also welcome relief from the chores of building and updating software from scratch.

If you've been reading our product evaluations in m.logistics, they should have given you a good idea of the flexibility of the new generation of application software development tools. They seem to offer the immediacy of out-of-the-box solutions, so you can start benefiting straight away; yet many allow you to update the forms fairly easily whenever you need to take account of changing business needs.

The reason out-of-the-box applications have proliferated is that a lot of them have become what's called device- and platform-agnostic. That means the software will run on any mobile computer and with a variety of operating systems. So programmers can write applications that will run on Symbian, Palm OS and the various Windows platforms.

Before, applications have had to be accompanied by special terminal emulation programs for each model of handheld. That slowed down the development of software for various applications, and it also meant that upgrading the software was difficult without the help of an IT professional.

The Java programming tools now adopted by many developers remove the need to be an IT expert. Users can often upgrade the software to take account of changing circumstances and, where applicable, update the application residing on the handheld.

These days mobile application software tends to operate on Windows CE and Pocket PC (the slimmed-down version of CE for PDA-type handhelds) or on the Palm OS. When it comes to the different flavours of Windows CE, handheld manufacturer Symbol, for example, believes Pocket PC suits straightforward data-capture, while the more customisable CE is better for data management applications.

Software developers are used to working with these operating systems, and workforce application software is following the same route as PC software; the approach is to make it modular so that businesses can add whatever functions they need.

A key benefit is that application software now has a familiar look to it, which makes it easier for users to navigate their away around. Most applications have the same type of drop-down menu that employees are used to seeing on their PC monitors.

You do need to make some choices before deciding on the actual application software. Do you want "fat" or "thin" applications? In other words, should the software reside on the mobile device (fat), or are you expecting the users to log on to applications housed on the company's server (thin)? Fat applications allow staff to continue working even if the wireless connection to the host computer is lost. Advocates of thin (sometimes called "smart" or "fit") applications say that their approach can still place enough functionality on the mobile device for work to continue during any communication breaks.

Another factor to consider is what you expect the application to do. Is it intended simply to manage job allocations and mobile worker locations as part of customer relationship management system? Do you want to capture data for batch processing? Do you want mobile workers to have access to corporate databases to view stock availability in real time, or download service instructions for particular equipment? How easy is it to integrate software with communications protocols?

Application software has an important role, too, in defining the way mobile workers do their jobs. For example, some companies prefer to give engineers one job at a time, forcing them to close off the previous job before being allocated the next. Others prefer you to give a service engineer or delivery drivers a list of say half a dozen jobs at the beginning of the day, but ensure they are done in the order listed, not randomly.

In both cases, the forms software delivers the control. It can also prevent transmission of incomplete records, so workers do not accidentally omit details critical for updating, say, customer databases, service histories or delivery times.

Any out-of-the box applications are modular. At the core is usually a generic suite of programs for managing mobile working, including communications protocols and battery management. Together with these come programs for a specific sector. Field service workers, for example, may need access to the customer database, or service history, and to the parts database. Logistics workers may need address information, digital signature capture or scanning software.

Anton Perez, managing director of software provider RangeGate, believes the sensible approach is to choose a supplier that has a toolkit that will give you most of the functionality you need to get up and running out-of-the-box. "You can then tailor and fine tune the application as needed, to meet the demands of your business."

That is what out-of-the-box modular software promises: enough functionality to get you up-and-running quickly, without the worry that events or changes to the business will make it obsolete before your workers have even got used to this new way or working. Whichever route you choose, make sure you that you can update forms with the minimum amount of fuss.

Who can deliver?

Many suppliers now offer rapid application software development packages or complete generic solutions for mobile workforce applications. We haven't the scope to list them all here, but they include APSolve, Avantgo, iAnywhere, i2 Mobile Solutions, C-Your-Data, Dexterra, Extended Systems, Intermec, OverNet Data, RangeGate, Telepartner Systems and Trakware. Most of these have featured in m.logistics;

see our new Web site, www.mlogmag.com, for more information, and go to pages 39­40 for the latest developments.