Willie Jow remembers the days when Mobility was all field workers

Now, with the explosion of Androids and iPods, tablets and notebooks, it’s a different world. Once it was the Hard Hats of the company, the engineers, who needed to be supported. Now, of course, the user base is much more white collar. The volume of data they’ll be looking for is gargantuan. And the pace of information change is almost instant.

Back then, a tow truck might be typing a few fields into their bulky husky laptop; vehicle registration, time of removal or damage to car, as they dragged it off the street and put it on the back of the truck. That sort of thing. Now, an executive might be turning up for a meeting and expecting the entire updated history of the customer to be on the laptop in front of them.

“Let’s say I travel to the customer with a binder full of information about them. These days, by the time I’m off the plane, it could be out of date,” says Jow.

The market moves so quickly these days. The problem is, some people and processes in your company will continue to move at glacial speed. This is where Sybase’s Mobility Solutions can help people communicate, work, live and transact as they have the freedom to operate anytime, anywhere, on any device with mobile apps that ease access to enterprise processes and information.

“When you want to buy something, there’s often about five levels of approval you have to go through before you get it signed off,” says Jow. “It means you can’t make an instant decision and get the best price.”

Jow’s department is committed to speeding up the clients’ flow of information. With the Sybase Unwired Platform, IT departments, developers and partners can easily create new or mobilise existing apps, whilst managing and securing devices with Afaria.

One client, for example, ships pallets full of comms equipment which, being worth around a million dollars a pop, need to be verified before they’re allowed out. But sometimes the bar codes on them can’t be read. So the VP of marketing has to be personally dragged down to identify and sign off the consignment. Which is obviously a big waste of time and money. (Not to mention ruining the Marketing VP’s day off).

These days, these bottlenecks can be avoided thanks to Sybase’s mobility solutions. SAP mobile apps can create a simple process that formalises the process of taking a picture of the mystery equipment and getting it approved by the right person, in a fraction of the time.

The great thing about the mobile application is that it’s encouraged the users to take more responsibility. “They take much better care of equipment when it’s their own device,” says Jow. “The expense of a device is less and support costs are lower too,” he says, “and people are self trained. People take more care of the devices when they are their own.”