
Imagine that a logistics company learned that a concealed flaw in truck engines was costing up to 100 minutes in lost productivity with every incident – and that the number was continuing to rise.
Something like this is already happening, but it isn’t with 18-wheelers. Surprisingly, the problem is physically far smaller, yet even more costly: it’s the handheld devices used by drivers, in warehouses, and just about everywhere along the delivery route.
Even one dropped connection or poorly performing application on a handheld device per shift can translate into up to 100 minutes in lost productivity. Today, with delivery times increasingly squeezed into a 24-hour window, those “lost 100 minutes” represents an astounding 23 percent of a worker’s daily shift.
The ROI of customer satisfaction is high, and so is the hard-dollar cost. It adds up to almost $20,000 annually in support and productivity costs per worker.
Recently, VDC Research conducted a global survey among enterprise mobility decision-makers across multiple industries. For transportation and logistics organizations, the consensus was clear: worker productivity is the most important and business-critical area in which they would like to invest.
However, organizations must also take another factor into account: that productivity now relies almost entirely on the reliability of a fleet’s mobile devices. When a device in the field fails, productivity quickly plummets. What’s more, trends in logistics predict that the seamless integration of mobile devices will be integral to long-term business success.
For example, as the demand for faster delivery continues to grow, the largest logistics companies in the world have begun moving away from managing enormous truck fleets to managing petabytes of data. Last year, Amazon announced plans to assemble its own fleet of delivery vans that would be operated by independent contractors. The rise of small, independent trucking firms linked only by mobile devices means the reliability of ruggedized hand-held devices is mission critical.
Dependable mobility and real-time access to crucial information at the point of interaction is the only way to navigate the vast and complex maze of workflows along the delivery route. Without it – or when a device in the field fails unexpectedly – logistics companies might find themselves flying blind. With so many of today’s organizations relying on mobility, selecting the right enterprise mobility management (EMM) partner for mobile device management (MDM) is therefore critical for maintaining – and boosting – productivity.
For logistics companies, lost productivity matters. Yet only one in five respondents from the VDC Research study said they have complete visibility into their business-critical mobility solutions.
Although EMM/MDM solutions are being widely adopted, many organizations fail to fully leverage the benefits of these solutions, hindering their ability to quickly diagnose and fix issues, which leads to costly downtime.
Here are 10 imperatives for transportation and logistics executives to consider:
Mobility management is too important, and lost productivity too costly, to ignore or leave to chance. Take a page from the most profitable logistics companies in the world, who ensure that they have proven EMM partners to keep their delivery engines revved up, and their workforces working.
Ryan Webber is Vice President of Enterprise Mobility at SOTI.
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