Are Mobile Solutions Limited to Large Enterprises?

Mobile solutions are not just for large enterprises. In fact, it is the smaller ones that have the agility to implement them quicker. A small company, with just 80 sales persons, successfully implemented a mobile solution for sales force automation (SFA) that within a year contributed directly to a 15% increase in sales with the same workforce. Did they meet with initial user resistance? Yes, they certainly did, but the management stuck to their resolve that only the mobile solution be used and not the spreadsheet processes they were following earlier. The head of sales refused to receive reports that did not come from the system. Yet it took a good six months for the sales persons to feel comfortable with the technology and to start delivering value, which was increase in sales.

Talking about agility, I know of a large automobile company that showed incredible agility in implementing a mobile sales solution. In just a few months they had an SFA mobile application in operation and the secret of such a successful implementation was almost entirely due to the dogged resolve on the part of the senior management to push though a project that they firmly believed would benefit their business. That and an allocation of resources to get the mobile solution implemented. This example brings to my mind a very important dictum in adopting enterprise mobile solutions: Plan for significant cost for implementation, which might even be more than the cost of the mobile solution software itself.