Mobility Adoption in India Manufacturing Enterprises
LONDON, July 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Reportbuyer.com has added a new market research report:
Mobility Adoption in India Manufacturing Enterprises
https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/2153623/Mobility-Adoption-in-India-Manufacturing-Enterprises.html
Companies have realized the benefits of mobility, the direct impact it can have on the topline, bottom line, accelerated cash flow, and productivity; and its intangible benefits such as high employee morale, speed in decision making and communication, and better customer connection. Mobility is the most widely adopted technology among the four pillars (social business, mobility, Big Data/analytics, and cloud) in India manufacturing enterprises, with some 42 % showing adoption of mobile devices and another 11% evaluating the relevance of mobility.
Mobility being a horizontal platform needs specific applications for its value to be realized, leading to a phased rollout for specific processes, functions, and management levels dependent upon the enterprise. This research report looks at specific journeys adopted by different types of businesses and the rationale behind them.
This IDC Manufacturing Insights report analyses different approaches companies have followed in the adoption of mobility across the enterprise using case studies. It examines how generic cross-enterprise mobile application deployment phases can be mapped and adapted specifically to manufacturing companies.
IDC''s telecom practice depicts the phases of mobility adoption in three steps:
- Mobilize the person
- Mobilize the process
- Mobilize the channel
The initial starting point is the internal communication between employees for basic enterprise collaboration applications such as email. The next step is to expose internal cross-enterprise applications and work flows such as human resources (HR) and finance. The basic applications are typically available ""out of the box,"" and require little development and maintenance. The next step is to mobilize the entire ecosystem consisting of partners, data feeds beyond humans (equipment, assets, and external data sources) and is usually accompanied by new business processes or models. A key aspect is security, that is, security layers should be in place where the applications are exposed outside the intranet.
The adoption among India manufacturing enterprises can be seen as a series of sequential waves:
- Enterprise collaboration -- voice communication, emails and information exchange tools, and dashboards for visibility of operations to management and decision makers.
- Deployment of specific applications -- applications specific to functions in an enterprise, for example, customer relationship management (CRM) for sales and marketing, shop floor management for manufacturing, distribution management system for the supply chain team, and others.
- Disruptive business models with mobility and a mash-up of other related technologies such as analytics/social business, for example, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication for telemetry, remote monitoring, and diagnostics with alerts for the consumer on a mobile phone.
The challenge in coming up with new mobile business models is to justify the return on investment (ROI). Justification begins with the collection of key data -- not just technical parameters from an IT perspective but performance parameters that impact the business from key processes and assets such as machines (uptime, mean time between failures, failure modes, and others). These are key performance indicators (KPIs) that are specific to the process getting mobilized -- real-time operational visibility to manufacturing problems, captured quality issues for quick action, supported customer-specific quotes, real-time inventory and GPS coordination for field teams, route optimization for transportation management, and others.
Inclusion of players outside the firm including suppliers and customers is required to make the data collection complete. Sound analytical models need to be built to utilize this data and make meaningful insights out of it. There should be clarity on the business impact offered by mobility with a sign-off from the functional head or line of business (LOB) leader. Applications may have to be developed or customized based on what is available in the market matching business needs with cost, effort, and schedule estimates. Change management to ensure adoption and use of the applications needs to be considered as a major factor for adoption.
""Improvement in decision making"" is the highest ranked factor for justifying investment in mobile technologies. This shows the ubiquity of mobility at all levels in an organization -- from senior management looking at mobile-enabled dashboards for company level decisions to a salesperson with visibility to inventory levels to decide which product to promote.
""Security and compliance"" and ""integration of mobile applications to other enterprise applications"" are the top challenges. Predictably, security is the area to which more investment will be allotted within mobility programs. The study further showed that 50% of respondents feel that vendors understand their products, not the business requirements.
Mobility is of medium priority compared with other ICT technologies. ""Changes and reengineering of business processes, work flows, and roles to take advantage of mobility"" rank highest among components of mobile strategy over the next 12 to 18 months. This clearly shows the connection between mobility and its ability to be a disruptive force for reengineering of traditional business processes. Figure 2 shows the components in the mobility road map and their relative priority of implementation.
There is a shift seen in the usage of mobility from today''s basic areas like networking/communication, task allocation, and ecommerce to more value-adding areas such as dashboards and real-time information access at the enterprise level. This helps in faster decision making, workforce management, and process automation.
With the spread of mobile devices beyond corporate circles to personal usage and with policies like bring your own device (BYOD) and choose your own device (CYOD), basic tasks such as communication and task allocation have become common and do not need much attention from CIOs. Internet access to Web sites alone is not sufficient. What is required is the next level of sophistication where the data is provided in a dashboard (with an analytics engine in the background) in a meaningful way that provides actionable insights and in real time to avoid the cost of delayed decisions, provided in a format that is understandable and actionable on a mobile device screen. Heavy spreadsheet type applications do not work well on a smartphone!
The following section describes three adoption cases of mobility covering both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) types of companies. A significant portion of the 42% companies that have adopted mobility are using it for the basic collaboration purposes to mobile enable their employees. These case studies showcase the potential for business impact by deployment of mobility beyond just the basic usage for emails and collaboration. Figure 3 shows the future landscape of where application of mobility is seen as part of the enterprise IT application landscape.
Cipla restarted its mobile device journey in 2012 after the CIO embarked on a series of field visits to understand the current usage and deployment. This resulted in a three-pronged strategy, to provide:
- Ease of access to information (product related -- order flow, inventory levels; people related -- doctors, chemists, and stockists)
- Ability to engage doctors, directly impacting the sales
- Convenience to the sales team in terms of the weight of the device they carry as the journey is ongoing
The key lesson learnt is to not get lost with the choice of device but to stay focused on the information accessibility that mobility will provide. Implementation sometimes gets lost with the latest device as a wow factor. The mobility journey should typically start from what information flow needs to happen (master data model, the IT platform itself, and integrations), who needs to get it and when (roles, security, and rules), and its benefits to business. The device comes at the end of the value chain and is a physical manifestation of the information.
Unless the information creates a different positive outcome, the mobility implementation does not offer significant impact. The CIO should do a proper expectation setting with the management and business stakeholders. Mobility is a journey in which there is learning along the way and it is not just the milestones that matter. Cipla''s plan is to mobile enable the sales team and then the business development team, R&D, and finally the manufacturing by the time when almost the entire enterprise would have been covered.
Future Group is a retail chain with pan-India presence and multiple store formats. Big Bazaar is its hypermarket chain with approximately 160 stores and revenue of US$3.3 billion in 2012.
Future Group''s journey with mobility/handheld devices started in 2010 with Motorola handheld devices for the store back-end operations. The device was implemented for all big format shops for inventory tracking and management. There is a central warehouse in Nagpur and 170 smaller warehouses spread across India from which goods are shipped to the retail shops. Service access point (SAP) IS retail is implemented as the IT backbone for demand forecasting and auto replenishment with Infor''s warehouse management system (WMS).
A new initiative called Big Bazaar Direct was launched six months back in a franchisee model, starting with 150 franchisees armed with a Samsung tablet that would be the point of sales, offering products at the customers'' doorstep and taking orders, leveraging Big Bazaar''s brand name. Shipment would take about a week for delivery. Customers who are enrolled in Big Bazaar''s rewards point program are targeted with a focus of not losing them to competitors. Future Supply Chain, which is a part of the parent group, takes care of the logistics. This is a lean pull model called ""aided ecommerce"" by the management through which customers'' orders flow directly to the central warehouse reducing the need for new retail shops and their administrative and inventory holding costs, while leveraging the existing infrastructure. The aim is to reach 50,000 franchisees in 2 years, by the end of 2015.
Mobility is the focus area and integral part of transformation theme in 2014, says Rajesh Saboo, head of IT, and the group will expand their horizon of technology and geography. According to him, the Future Group Technology Team is aiming for ""information anywhere, anytime, and any device.""
With more than 90% revenue coming from oil marketing and other mid-sized oil companies in a B2B setup, Essar Oil''s key focus is on providing seamless integration and information flow to these key customers as well as the marketing personnel who manage these relationships. With this in mind, SAP order management system (OMS) was implemented. It assists customers to get real-time information on orders, loading details, and invoices; and also dispatch planners and the sales/marketing team to get visibility on the customer needs and order pipeline. This has resulted in the acceleration of the entire business process by automating the process.
This IDC Manufacturing Insights report discusses some patterns observed in the adoption of mobility among large manufacturing enterprises in India. Each approach has its own pros and cons, depending on how quickly mobility should be embraced across the firm, its risk-taking abilities, the investment required, and the overall business priorities.
"Awareness and adoption of mobility and related technologies have been high compared to other emerging technologies for the impact that mobility can offer to the business. Having a clear idea of the road map or when to implement mobility for which function/department will help both the enterprise and service providers to plan effectively with established blueprints for effective implementation," says S Ramachandran, research manager, IDC Manufacturing Insights.
Table of Contents
In This Perspective
Where Are We Today?
Adoption of Mobility in Manufacturing
Mobility in Today''s Scenario
Mobility in the Future and the Shift toward Value-Adding Applications
Adoption of Mobility
B2C: Cipla Case Study
B2C: Future Group''s Pilot
B2B Case Study: Essar Oil
Mobility Service Providers
Future Outlook
Journey to Roll Out Mobility
Justification for Mobility Adoption in India Manufacturing
Actions to Consider
For Manufacturing Enterprises
Sales First, Rest Later -- B2C, Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises
Core Functions First -- B2B, Large Enterprises
Challenges to Overcome
Learn More
Related Research
Synopsis
Figure: The Enterprise Mobility Solutions Ecosystem
Figure: Components of the Mobility Road Map and Their Relative Priority of Implementation
Figure: Future Landscape of Mobility Application in the Enterprise Application Landscape
Figure: Multiple Journeys for Implementing Mobility in Enterprises
Read the full report:
Mobility Adoption in India Manufacturing Enterprises
https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/2153623/Mobility-Adoption-in-India-Manufacturing-Enterprises.html
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