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.
Balancing organizational needs in any complex mobile technology rollout has to be well planned and executed for success. Operationally, you want avoid solutions that don’t meet process needs and are too complicated for end users, and from a technology perspective your solution needs to address the cost, security and support resources required to implement and manage. Here are a few guidelines for helping make sure all these requirements are met:
Every technology project is a bit different, but the success all goes back to the planning phase at the beginning. You have to lay out your project requirements, exactly what’s going to be done, when, and by whom up-front.
If you don’t plan for every detail, including what the end user experience will be and how they’ll interact with the solution, then you are likely setting yourself up for significant challenges in order to reap the desired benefits of your mobile program. It’s critical to put forth the effort to build an exhaustive blueprint so everything else that follows can be more efficient, effective, and ultimately successful.
Additionally, make sure there is someone dedicated to managing the project with specific expertise in the solution who can successfully plan and direct the entire process. Complex mobile projects require the use of proven methodologies to track and anticipate critical factors through all phases of the project and be able to manage unique challenges that can arise. That 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.
Warehouses don’t like to change unless they absolutely have to, so make sure to plan your project and evaluate your technology solutions for the long-term.
For example, some mobile solutions require changes to software or major updates every six months. If you don’t or can’t implement those updates, then you may end up with software or devices that are unusable. So you want to have control over your solutions and think long-term, so you can avoid these kinds of issues.
Fortunately, there are other solutions that are designed to run for five 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.
Ultimately, you can achieve success with a mobile technology implementation by looking at several crucial factors as you evaluate your options. You need to:
To help you along the way, leverage partners with experience designing solutions for your specific use cases. Getting advice and guidance from experts who can educate you on the latest available solutions, recommend potential hardware, and help you test and validate them can save you a lot of potential grief later.
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.
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.
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?
467% of Manufacturers & Warehouses outsource device repair/replacement services and 33% outsource call center/IT support.
2021 Enterprise Mobility Outlook, Stratix & VDC Research
