Mobile Workforces — 4 Ways to Boost Productivity

The long-standing drive for more efficient and accurate business processes is evolving to include greater emphasis on the user experience and an understanding of the associated benefits. Driven in part by growing user expectations from enterprise mobile technology which is now mirroring similarities that consumers are experiencing from their own phones; simple engaging user experience and easy to use interfaces with in-situ contextual help.

Addressing user expectation trends is, after all, simply about enhancing engagement with the interface, facilitating the adoption of new processes in a simple manner and providing clarity and ease.

With these common challenges addressed the expected efficiency gains can then be seen. Ultimately, if people are hindered by complexity the adoption of new processes will remain lower than required and can often worsen over time

There are numerous proven cost, quality, efficiency and productivity benefits to mobilising a workforce and the business processes they execute. For example, we see productivity gains of 20-30% in many warehouse and supply scenarios. However, the mobile user interface and resulting UX which have yet to keep pace with expectations, can significantly impact the potential gains and indirect benefits/costs, such as on-boarding, training and user adoption rates.

Activities carried out with directly integrated mobile technology also provides the benefit of real-time information, removing the lag of paper-based activities. Furthermore, mobile technology allows us to redesign processes entirely for greater efficiency, for example with mobile printing for on-demand labels during pick and pack activities. Yet if training is complex and laborious, on-boarding time will be extensive with less of a guarantee that engagement and process reliability will be high.

Many standard mobile solutions fail to provide a responsive interface design and contextual help is often lacking, resulting in benefits, such as instantly updated inventory and stock availability not being realised to their full potential.

Today, SAP recommends using the Internet Transaction Server (ITS) mobile technology. ITS is SAP’s standard technology to bring applications based on SAP Dynpros to the web and mobile devices. This provides a fast route to mobile screens for your SAP transactions, but the results from a UX perspective often leave a lot to be desired and are a barrier to full benefits realisation.

(Are you currently evaluating SAP mobility solutions such as ITS, Fiori or Cloud Platform Mobile Services or other non-SAP bolt on’s such as Moviliser? Download our comprehensive guide to mobilising your SAP supply chain workforce today).

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Rocket channelled their extensive experience of SAP mobility, mobile technology, mobile development and SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) to provide a transformed SAP mobile UX in the form of Rocket Mobile.

Rocket Mobile fulfils their customers' need for simplicity, ease of use and complete alignment to their SAP investment strategy with a 100% integrated and SAP-centric solution. When designing Rocket Mobile, the aim was simple, to provide a compelling solution to customers that would improve the overall user experience without the need for third-party add-ons.

4 Ways to Boost Productivity

Rocket Mobile brings with it many advantages and improves upon many aspects of the SAP ITS standard, some of these advantages are:

• Improved productivity – Simpler screen layouts reduce training times and improves the concept of user adoption; users will be more willing to adopt this solution which is a large hidden cost for technology projects. Improving the comfort of users in turn creates less resistance and smoother change management.

• Support rich image scenarios – There has been more demand for image rich content and scenarios which workers can quickly access to view operational information or when selecting the correct product(s). Creating a platform within Rocket Mobile makes screen-showing clearer, more attractive and is proving much easier to use.

• Optimised input and ease of use – Standard EWM screens are cluttered and take longer to navigate. Rocket Mobile has simplified screen layouts and optimised inputs for different device types ranging from; touch screen, voice activated and key press devices – all of this brings huge time saving benefits to operations.

• Better incident tracking – Rocket Mobile brings with it a feature called ‘Snap and Go’, this allows the user to take a photo of an incident i.e. broken glass, which will automatically route to the designated operations supervisor.

There is great value within the Standard EWM RF framework, because of this the Rocket Mobile was designed to continue providing all the benefits of the standard SAP ITS and expanded on this by adding many additional benefits without affecting the way the framework works.

If you would like further information, request a demo to see the improved UX for yourself and see the benefits to be gained from the Rocket Mobile UX. www.rocket-consulting.com