Almost two years ago I posted my Mobile PLM gold rush – did vendors miss the point? post. Mobile usage is skyrocketing. It is hard to imagine our lives without mobile devices. Is it a good time to get back to the conversation about PLM, engineers and mobile? What is a special purpose of mobile applications for engineers and product lifecycle management?
I was reading The Future of Enterprise Mobility article earlier this week. Article focuses on the research done by 451 Research and Yankee Group about mobile applications and enterprise. I captured two main challenges – data and device type. First one is easy and complex at the same time – too much data is flowing through mobile devices these days. IT cannot protect the environment from mobile devices- this is a reality. Another one is related to a diverse number of mobile developers – Apple, Samsung, Nokia (Microsoft) ,Blackberry. Here is my favorite passage:
Among the changes Yankee Group looks to take place is that mobile applications will move front and center. It’s only in fairly recent times that the tools to help companies affect this shift have been available. Tools that are both enterprise-grade and that offer the type of agility, scalability and flexibility for enterprises to innovate in a truly mobile-world have not long been a reality. They are beginning to emerge, but enterprises are still being sold either the false promise that traditional approaches have all along allowed this capability or the false compromise that you can’t have both.
Another market change is mobile cloud platforms will look to become the new mobile middleware. New mobile cloud development and infrastructure platforms have emerged during the past 18 months with a steely gaze on the enterprise, on the proliferation of internal and customer-facing applications being considered, and on becoming the new mobile enterprise middleware. By abstracting much of the traditional back-end engineering complexity to cloud-based services, these vendors offer a compelling approach, one that will continue to have market-wide impact and be key to helping enterprises scale not only their applications and projects but also their innovation.
So, what are potential problems and issues vendors are facing developing their mobile strategies. Is it just “another screen” with a little bit different user experience? From my view, many of enterprise people including engineers, this is how mobile devices was perceived for the last few years. Mobile applications for engineers and PLM, specifically, used mobile coolness factor, but didn’t deliver much value. Thinking about that, I thought ROM (Return on Mobility) topic introduced in the article is a good parameter to manage before deciding about future mobile options for PLM and engineers.
The Return on Mobility scorecard is a new research methodology that calculates the value enterprises achieve from their investments in the platforms they use to develop, deploy and manage mobile technologies and services. It’s an ROI specifically for mobility. With the increasing importance of mobile, social and cloud technologies enabling business success, it’s crucial for companies to make the right, informed decisions concerning the solutions and platforms they use. – The focus of the RoM scorecard goes beyond total cost of ownership to measure ROI for enterprises through benefits such as application integration, employee productivity and customer experience.
It made me think what can be an easy ROI from mobile technologies in product development and manufacturing. Here is my guess. Process speed. By increasing and optimizing processes, we can improve decision making and information flow. An example can be ECR/ECO process. Cost of ECO is one of the highest for every manufacturing and development organization. One of the opportunity to get ECO process faster. Email and messaging are two top scored mobile applications. We use it everywhere. It must be a very good way to get people involved into the process and speed process up. For the last years we gathered lots of experience in mobile email. To connect mobile email to ECO process with right context can provide high ROM.
What is my conclusion? In my view, we came to the end of “mobile for the sake of mobile” story. ROM is an absolutely right approach that must be taking into account before every mobile application for engineers will be developed. PLM process speed and specifically ECO/ECN turnaround can be a good application for mobile platforms and tech. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
