Wireless apps a key differentiator for supply chain entities

Take a stroll through your local mall, grocery store, airport or teen hang-out and you can clearly see how truly ubiquitous mobile technologies have become.  Pick up an article from Business Week or any other well know industry publication and you get statistics on mobile phone penetration, the success of the iPhone and the million dollar rags-to-riches stories of pre-pubescent children writing their own mobile phone apps and selling them like hot-cakes.  It seems everywhere you look our world is becoming one of mobile technologies and user-friendly apps designed to handle everything from to-do lists to telling you the latitude and longitude of your lost pet Rufus.

However, take a close look at the modern day critical supply chain and you see a different world.  A world juxtaposed to that of our mobile-social lives.  In this world, the large transport companies and service providers of the world invest in proprietary hardware platforms and non-uniform technologies.  This cobbled patchwork of devices, software, and communication protocols makes integration between service providers and visibility difficult and expensive.  In this world, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than receiving real-time tracking of your critical part supply chain.  This is the world where corporate IT departments and large bureaucratic organizations drive corporate standards and old-line technologies while the rising tide of cloud-computing, SaaS and ground-breaking technologies surround them.

I recently sat down with Venus Desai, a co-founder of IT Anyplace, to get his perspective on how mobile technologies can change the game for supply chain companies seeking to be more competitive and deliver better value for their customers.  Venus and his team of co-founders at IT Anyplace have seen quite a bit of change in the mobile landscape in their 50 combined years of delivering ground-breaking technology products to big businesses and he provided some great insight.

Q&A with Venus Desai, Co-Founder, IT Anyplace

Q: What are the common challenges encountered when companies try to extend their enterprise applications to mobile devices?

A: We see primarily 3 common challenges in these environments:

• The first challenge is one concerning the lack of device standardization.  Corporations have to determine which devices they will build for.  Additionally, they have to try to make a determination about how long these devices will be on the market & what regions or particular challenges may exist across the whole geography that the company does business in.
• The second challenge surrounds how a company will extend multiple legacy systems on the wide variety of handsets available.
• The third challenge we most commonly find when we go into an organization concerns the lack of internal talent that is well versed in application development for the mobile market coupled with limited knowledge from vendors of the legacy systems and applications that they need to tie into.

Q: As we survey the BRIC countries and look outward to the developing world it seems that the traditional wireline communication method is being largely skipped in some areas.  Do you have any particular insights on this trend?

A: The mobile subscribers of the world are already significantly outnumbering the traditional wireline subscribers.  Infonetics Research estimates that in 2007 there were approximately 3.3 Billion mobile subscribers to 1.1 Billion wireline subscribers.  Even more interesting, in this same report they found that the wireless subscribers were growing at a rate of approximately 31% versus a decline of 5% in wireline.

From a personal standpoint, and having family in India, I believe that we are seeing in countries like India and China a phenomenon whereby some persons don’t use a PC but instead access data, the Internet, and other functions directly from their mobile phone.

Q: Given the 3 to 1 trend in mobile to wireline and the expected 4 to 1 ratio by 2011, what do you think are the key takeaways for supply chain companies?

A: The takeaway is that any company that is not yet thinking about how to deploy their businesses on mobile devices is already behind the curve.  Supply chain related entities in particular can derive great value through mobile applications and providing customers additional functionality.

Q: If I were an established supply chain firm looking to extend my presence and application(s) to a mobile device what would be your advice?

A: My first advice would be to take your existing web presence and have it formatted so it is easily accessible from a mobile device.  The next piece of advice would be to identify the features of a mobile phone that have value for your business.  For example, in a supply chain setting the GPS on a phone could be used for tracking, the camera could be used for package condition capture / bar-code type conversion, etc.  Once you’ve identified these valuable features that you would like to use from the phone you would then seek to integrate with your legacy systems.  This is where a company like IT Anyplace comes in.  We help companies do this in a fashion that is more cost effective then can typically occur internally.

From my discussions with Venus it is hard to understand why any enterprise wouldn’t be already involved in mobile application development to extend and improve the operational efficacy of their enterprise as well as their value proposition for their customers.

Today’s supply chain firms should be aware of some key trends that have the ability to leap-frog their enterprise into the future or relegate them to the long list of “use-to-be” industry players.

Key Trends & Observations:

1. Current usage of “off-the-shelf” smart phones in supply chain environments for system integration / usage has been limited. Historically, larger firms have invested in proprietary and highly customized devices for their field networks.  This will change and we will start to see both larger & smaller entities develop and deploy applications to off-the-shelf smart-phones, both internally for operational personnel, as well as externally to customers.
2. Smaller supply chain entities will begin venturing into markets that may once have been off limits due to the Capex requirements.  These smaller entities will be able to offer compelling, technology-forward solutions by leveraging capabilities inherit in off the shelf mobile handsets.
3. Particular benefactors of mobile technology adoption for their operational and customer constituencies will be critical supply chain environments such as spare parts, courier services, and time sensitive flyers (NFO services).
4. Proliferation of smart phones will pave the way for real-time tracking and alerting of package movements.

Without a doubt the next five years will feature continued steady adoption of smart phones across the world.  In fact, just in mid-September (2009), Fedex announced that they would begin migration to the MC9500, a rugged handheld device, manufactured by Motorola that is an off-the-shelf handset.

fedex makes the switch

The true opportunity and challenge for supply chain oriented businesses will be if they can capitalize on this trend by developing compelling applications that leverage the mobile device capabilities at a price point that makes sense.

Many thanks to Venus Desai and his team at IT Anyplace for their interesting insights and industry statistics that were provided for this article.  Information on IT Anyplace and their work in the mobile community can be found at their website located at www.itanyplace.com

Statistics of Note:

• Current mobile handsets offer as much as an 80% cost break to similar proprietary hardware platforms used by large transport entities, etc.
• 50% of mobile Internet traffic in US comes from iPhone
• Worldwide Smart Phone operating system share: Nokia (45%); RIM (20%); Apple (14%); Android (6%)
• Expected number of worldwide mobile subscribers in 2011, 5.2 Billion

About IT Anyplace:

ITAnyplace is a start-up based in Atlanta, Georgia that was founded in late 2007 to build a platform that accomplishes two main goals, critical to any enterprise IT team.
1. Extend multiple, diverse legacy IT systems within an enterprise to the mobile device.
2. The second goal is to make this capability device/platform agnostics so that it can be accessed from any mobile device/app store, without having to create it individually for every device in use within the enterprise or not having to commit to any device type.

IT Anyplace have completed their core platform development, tested it and are now deploying it with major customers, some of which are in the logistics field.