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.
Operations teams typically have different goals than IT when it comes to mobile technology transformations. Ultimately, operations wants to avoid solutions that don’t meet process needs and are too complicated for end users. And they want solutions to work and be reliable whenever they’re needed. Here are a few guidelines for helping make sure all these requirements are met.
When you’re looking to use mobile technology to modernize, automate, and optimize your warehouse, it’s operations, not IT, that will determine the use case. Operations determine the business goals and needs, the use case, and how end users are going to use any proposed technology.
As an operations leader, you need to work on each of these areas and do your part to build out those aspects of the overall plan. Take all your goals, needs, use cases, and users into consideration, and get guidance on the right solutions for them.
While IT will tend to focus on the technical side and how solutions might integrate with your existing IT infrastructure and networks, you need to take leadership on how solutions need to help automate and optimize workflows and processes, and how they’ll help you meet your business goals and outcomes.
For example, you may need devices in your operations that can be shared and used by multiple workers on different shifts. The handoff needs to be quick, simple and seamless, so you may need a solution with secure single sign-on that allows a user to grab a device and automatically sign out the previous user and quickly sign into the device and all mobile apps and services by using one login and authentication process.
It’s important to keep testing and training in mind as well, serving as an advocate to ensure your end users are part of the rollout process and receive the right training and instruction to ensure they can use your solutions successfully.
Get your end users involved in the process as early as possible, and especially during solution selection. Give them options to evaluate and consider. You don’t want to give them too many options, but you need to give them enough for them to feel that they’ve chosen the solution that meets their needs.
User feedback is essential to help you find the right solutions and can often make the difference between a successful implementation and a disastrous failure where you have to change mobile devices, change software choices, or otherwise re-work an entire solution because you didn’t get it right the first time.
For example, we’ve seen several cases where the warehouse workforce was quite young and didn’t like big, rugged handheld devices. They wanted something smaller and sleeker that they could carry around more easily. In these cases, the warehouse listened to their feedback and chose smaller, more compact mobile devices that still had good durability specs and accessories to help enhance their ruggedness without sacrificing a smaller form factor.
By listening to their end users and getting them involved in technology evaluation, they avoided potential resistance to adoption and created an immediately positive and receptive atmosphere for the final rollout.
Unless you’re deliberately implementing mobile technologies to reinvent or replace a particular process, you’ll probably need to choose and design solutions to fit into your existing warehouse workflows and processes.
As an operations leader, you should determine what’s needed in terms of those workflows and processes, and IT will help determine the required mobile capabilities, hardware, software, and support .
But one of the biggest concerns that most warehouses have about implementing new technologies is the possibility that a new solution rollout will disrupt existing processes. The key to avoiding disruption is to do a phased rollout, where you don’t shut down any current processes. Instead, you can work off-shift to do an implementation, or you can break it into smaller, manageable stages that minimize any temporary disruptions or interruptions.
Pilot tests, validation, and testing are also big keys to successful integration into existing processes. Take the time to test your solutions first, validate their efficacy, and then do your due diligence with user training to make sure everyone is ready to switch over to your new solution and an updated or improved process once the time comes.
Many warehouses just leave the issue of technology support to IT, but it’s one that every leader involved in a new mobile technology initiative should keep in mind.
Any new mobile technology launch isn’t just about day one. It’s also about day two and beyond. You need to know how your solution and your end users will be supported. You need to know what the support process will be and how you will keep your solution operational and minimize downtime or user issues.
Help desk support: What hours of coverage, SLAs, and application knowledge do they need to have?
Device repair and replacement: How mission-critical are your devices? Do you need 24-hour replacement? Are repairs covered?
New devices: As your company grows, your business demands expand, and you hire more employees, how easy is it to add additional devices to cover your needs?
Security and patch management: How will you push updates and upgrades?
Asset management: Do you know where your devices are? Do you have enough spare pool to cover?
Whether IT is going to provide and manage support internally or you decide to outsource support externally, you will need a good support plan in place. Make sure your project has planned for these needs and that you’ve define the support process and will have all the right resources in place to enable it.
Measuring the success of a mobile technology rollout can be difficult, particularly if you want to measure on a large scale, across an entire implementation. To make things easier and help you define success, it’s often better to start smaller by running a pilot.
Don’t roll out the entire solution and then measure. Instead, start with your existing processes and what you can measure now. Let that help you define your potential success. Will it be in terms of more productivity, more efficiency, reduced error counts, or some other metric?
Then run a pilot and roll out a small subset of your solution, with all the processes mapped out and measurements in place. Provide the devices and training, run the pilot, and then measure the outcomes. If you achieve your goals and your users are happy, then that’s success.
It’s also important to remember to measure current performance and defined success for each use case, and then pilot and evaluate the specific solutions for each of those cases. You can start with one area, get it done, and then move on to another. You can’t just assume that the success of one solution for one area means all your other solutions are going to work well and generate similar results in other workflows and processes.
467% of Manufacturers & Warehouses outsource device repair/replacement services and 33% outsource call center/IT support.
2021 Enterprise Mobility Outlook, Stratix & VDC Research
