Business Mobility Provides Needed Economic Relief

Business Wire, Feb 5, 2009

BOTHELL, Wash. -- In a time of belt tightening and budget cutting, one information technology (IT) company has a message for worried CFOs: invest in mobility, quickly. Dexterra, Inc., which bills itself as the Business Mobility Company, has good reason to be bullish even when the economic picture appears bleak.

"Despite the economic outlook, the fact remains that over the last two years advances in smartphone technology and lower costs for wireless service, combined with the ubiquity of high speed wireless networks have made it possible to affordably untether an entire workforce," says Dexterra's new CEO, Michael Liebow.

Dexterra, which put Liebow at its helm in July, offers medium to large businesses a broad portfolio of mobile applications built on its mobility platform, Dexterra Concert. Businesses worldwide use Dexterra to manage their mobile workforces and improve efficiency by taking their existing office-based software and turning elements into mobile applications that can be used on the most popular business smartphones.

EMBRACING THE MOBILITY REVOLUTION

Liebow advises business leaders to embrace mobility for two key reasons. The first is that letting employees use highly portable smartphones to quickly complete important business tasks while in the field makes businesses more efficient and brings them closer to customers. The second is that whether a business embraces mobility or not, its employees most certainly will as cool and compelling phones like the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Storm and T-Mobile G1 become increasingly affordable, most selling for less than $200.

Liebow says that if employees want this technology they will bring it into a company whether that company has sanctioned its use or not, posing management and control issues that could very well puncture network security and disrupt mandatory compliance requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley. "There is no benefit to avoiding mobility this year or any other year. The downturn in the economy increases the need for the efficiencies that only mobility can provide."

Liebow isn't alone in this opinion; his recent new customers are saying the same thing.

"It's common in service organizations that work days are pretty fast paced. Dispatchers are trying to determine exactly when technicians will arrive and leave a customer site, and are constantly interrupting technicians for status updates while they are in the middle of working with a customer," said Rod Ghani, AVP business development, technology applications for Safelite. "We knew there were significant gains to be made in customer service and employee productivity if we could eliminate the inefficient manual interaction and still deliver the information in real-time."

Safelite decided to make its field operations more efficient by equipping technicians with handheld devices that would allow them to process work orders electronically, as well as check parts status immediately. But while Safelite has a strong internal IT development team, the company had no previous experience in developing mobile business applications. To achieve its mobile and application development objectives quickly and painlessly, the company turned to Dexterra.

"In such a competitive market, customer service and satisfaction is key. Standardizing our field activities and arming our customer-facing staff with better mobile tools is a critical component in this, particularly as the dependence between meeting customer expectations and receiving additional orders increases," said Paul Buttery, managing director of the access division at Virgin Media. "Using Dexterra's platform, our technicians are equipped with the necessary applications to complete each job on the first visit, which not only greatly increases internal efficiency and cost savings, but also ensures ongoing customer satisfaction."

A key message Dexterra is communicating to its prospects is that mobility need not be an expensive and complicated proposition. The company is keenly aware that business IT departments have already invested thousands of dollars on the office-based software systems - from customer relationship management software to accounting to proprietary business systems - that allow a company to function. A new mobility strategy does not mean replacing any of this "legacy" software with new systems, or even getting new software that requires reinventing internal processes and work habits for employees. To help IT leaders better understand the measurable financial benefit for mobilizing their company and employees, Dexterra has built an online ROI calculator available on its website http://www.dexterra.com/resources/calculator.php?s=s027.

BUILDING THE WINNING MOBILITY STRATEGY

"A winning mobility strategy is task-centric," explains Liebow. "It is built on the processes already in place and plays to the way employees want to work. There are things that people need to do every day. Mobility lets them complete those functions as they happen, instead of having to find a place to connect a laptop, disrupting an office worker, or waiting to get back to the office. Our customers are able to shave time off the workflow, and grow without adding additional administrative personnel or burdening the existing staff. Mobility is highly efficient."