When put in the hands of field workers, not just executives, the benefits of mobile apps to (especially large and regulated) organizations are many and well understood:
- Reduced cost and environmental impact from a lessened reliance on paper
- Instant retrieval and transmittal of information; no more hunting down data
- Instant status updates; no more need for slow, manual progress reports
- More control over work execution, leading to higher quality work with fewer mistakes
- Integrated knowledge transfer through the application of multimedia functionality
- And much more
But the most powerful benefit doesn’t tie back to any one specific piece of ROI – it’s the highly subjective, extraordinarily transformative culture shift that comes from something modern finally being introduced into a place that has been going at it, “business as usual,” for decades.
We had the opportunity to supply the technology for a mobile work management pilot in late 2017, and to see the excitement in the eyes of (mostly younger, but many older) maintenance workers who used a tablet for the first time in the field was nothing short of palpable. Many of them even refused training; they just picked up the device and started playing with it, and within five minutes and a bit of trial-and-error, had it figured out.
But what was transformative wasn’t the giddiness of playing with a new toy, but the ideas that started pouring out of those maintenance workers (ignoring the multiple requests for Candy Crush). Software vendors and industry executives can have good ideas for how to make workers more efficient, but only one group of people really know – and those are the ones dealing with dumb, irrelevant, broken, or inefficient processes, day in and day out.
And beyond the thousands of incrementally important improvements that are at our fingertips to make, the truth is that we’re only starting to explore the possibilities that a digital platform can give us – especially in industries that perform a lot of highly regulated, high reliability work, where mistakes can lead to injuries and death, not just a stock that only slightly outperforms the Nasdaq.
Imagine a (very near) augmented-reality future where the projected image of an experienced foreman walks a rookie through a complicated procedure without having to physically be there. Or an AI-backed help center that accounts for weather conditions and meter readings to present troubleshooting options when things go wrong during maintenance.
All of these are tantalizingly close and relatively inexpensive – certainly less expensive than maintaining the status quo. And with mobile devices already in people’s hands, the path to get there will be as simple as installing an update.
If you’re looking to take an initial step towards transforming your organization to a digital platform, please contact us for a free consultation.
