Mobile Field Sales & Services

Pat Brans, Solution Business Manager, Hewlett-Packard

There is a great interest in applying mobile technology to enhance the productivity of workers in specific job functions where workers are frequently on the move. Indeed, one can speak of reengineering the business processes of such workers by enabling access to critical information. Today the lack of information is a bottleneck, slowing down the activities of mobile workers by requiring extra steps and extra trips to the office. Several technologies are now at a sufficient state of maturity to allow some big improvements in the way this kind of work is done.

The specifics of the business processes that can benefit are highly dependent on the industry - and very often even on the company - to which mobile solutions are applied. However, in general terms one can speak of two broad categories of job that can be most enhanced through mobile technologies - sales and services.

We will start out by talking about some of the activities of workers in these two categories. Then we will take two industry-specific use cases where the lack of information is currently a bottleneck. We will cover the business processes of the pharmaceutical sales rep, and those of the high-tech field technician.