While mobile-led digital transformation is critical to remaining competitive and efficient, these transformation initiatives are extremely complex and often fail. There are many factors that can contribute to a failed or stalled initiative, including:
Addressing these challenges comes with significant complexities that many organizations don’t have internal resources to manage. For example, while 77% of respondents in a recent Zebra Technologies Warehouse Vision study agreed that augmenting their workers with technology was the best way to introduce automation in the warehouse, only 35% of them said they had a clear understanding of where to start.
These numbers illustrate the importance of having a clear roadmap for exactly how to implement your mobile transformation initiative. If you don’t plan out the entire solution and lay it out in a project plan to ensure that all the pieces fall into place at the correct time, there’s a good chance your transformation is going to fail. If you haven’t considered and outlined the right factors, strategies and steps for each piece of the project, each one of those areas could be a potential failure point.
However, if you lay everything out in an end-to-end project plan, with the final objective clearly stated and all the right factors and strategies considered and outlined, you’re virtually guaranteed success. Depending on your role in the process, there are some key strategies for planning success that you should keep in mind.
IT teams and departments typically have a few core issues they’re looking to avoid in any mobile technology rollout. Ultimately, you want to avoid solutions that cost too much, are too complicated, or don’t fit into your existing IT support and resource model. Here are a few ways to ensure success.
Every technology project is a bit different, but it all goes back to the planning phase at the beginning. If you don’t plan for every detail and make sure all the pieces are there, then your rollout won’t be successful. Take the extra time and make the extra effort to be exhaustive at the planning stage, so everything that follows can be more efficient, effective, and successful.
Additionally, make sure there is someone managing the project with specific expertise in the solution so that they can successfully plan and direct the entire process. Complex mobile projects require not only the use of proven methodologies to track and anticipate critical factors through all phases of the project but also the ability to manage unique challenges that can arise. A project manager doesn’t have to be someone within your organization. If your internal resources or expertise has limits, consider working with a managed mobility services partner to help you plan, design, test, deploy, train, and support your solution.
Bring in somebody who has the experience implementing the technologies you might need to implement and that has good relationships working with the various vendors of those technologies. Getting advice and guidance from experts who know the latest available solutions, understand the implications of upcoming changes (like 5G), can recommend potential hardware, and help you test and validate them can save you a lot of time and effort in research.
A big challenge for many warehouses is that they can’t simply replace all their current systems at once. You may want and need to implement new mobile technologies, but you may also need to integrate them seamlessly with legacy systems.
Take heart, there are readily available warehouse management software solutions, WHS or an ERP. There’s almost always a mobile hardware and software package that will allow you to use that existing legacy solution on a new mobile device, with a new OS.
There are also many ways to port over from Windows to Android or from keypad to touch-enabled solutions. For example, Zebra’s All-Touch Terminal Emulation is a software solution that enables the conversion of legacy “green screen” telnet apps to beautiful Android all-touch mobile apps that your implementation partner would bring. Solutions like these are great ways to keep using legacy systems on the back end while completely transforming the front-end user experience with the latest mobile operating systems and hardware.
77% of respondents agree that augmenting workers with technology is the best way to introduce automation in the warehouse
Zebra Technologies Warehouse Vision study
Warehouses don’t like to change unless they absolutely have to, so be sure to build out a five-year blueprint for your project, not just a short-term plan.
For example, some mobile solutions require changes to software or major updates every six months. If you don’t implement those updates, then you may end up with software or devices that are unusable. You want to have control over your solutions and think long term, so you can avoid being tied to these kinds of updates.
Fortunately, there are other solutions that are designed to run for 5 to 10 years and aren’t tied to specific OS updates or other changes that could cause pain in your warehouse. By building a plan or blueprint for 5 years or more, you can take advantage of solutions like these and better anticipate other issues that would otherwise derail your warehouse technology initiative.
Any new mobile technology launch isn’t just about day one; it’s also about day two and beyond. You need to know how you’re going to support your solution, keep it operational, and minimize downtime or user issues with a proper support process. As we highlighted earlier, whether you’re going to provide and manage support internally or externally, or through a hybrid approach, your support plan will need to be comprehensive and consider the end user, the devices, and your expected business outcomes. You need a comprehensive plan.
Key Elements of Comprehensive Support
