B2E Apps- Enabling businesses to be more efficient and productive
In 1910 Henry ford wouldn’t have imagined that his company would grow to the behemoth it is now. What started as a small-scale motor company grew leaps and bounds due to automating some of the more human intensive processes. It ensured that the company was not severely affected by the great depression of 1933.
Today most of the organisations around the world use automation as a means of establishing a competitive advantage. However, a lot has changed since then. Companies are more reliant on utilising automation for creating an outstanding experience for their workforce.
Using current mobile technologies, businesses have started building their collaterals around employees for increased efficiencies and productivity at work.
Google, Amazon, Oracle, Starbucks, Lyft have paved way for employee centric process automation through applications such as office communicator, micro applications for day to day activities, reporting, scheduling and much more.
An organisation can become more efficient, save cost, and make their employees more productive impacting the overall growth of the organisation through deploying these applications.
1. Workflow automation-
Automating processes leads to a higher productivity. Machines and intelligent systems are more capable of executing some complex tasks at a greater speed. There are various types of process automation. One such approach uses natural language processing for a more human like approach towards problem solving. Chat bots with machine learning utilises aspects of NLP. They are trained on data sets of companies are enabling more human like interactions obliterating the need for a human controller.
Voice based mobile applications on Google home, Alexa, are being deployed by companies around the world to automate searches, queries and finding solutions to problems without much human intervention.
Automation in day to day processes for the workforce has a lot of scope of growth in the coming future. Although, it would quite frankly take away much of ‘human’ jobs, there would be new avenues wherein jobs would be created. While most of the mundane jobs would go obsolete, more skill-based roles like data science, and analysis would become the mainstay for organisations soon according to McKinsey’s analysis.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute Analysis
2. Mobility for the workforce
Companies can introduce their own owns apps to ensure that all the relevant information can be accessed, documented and analysed on the go.
Businesses are transitioning to cloud, and so it is easier than ever to authenticate a user information with services like Amazon Cognito, allowing an employee to login through their company’s credential.
Oracle and Google have already transitioned to a more connected workforce. With a suite of apps that help workers to accomplish their tasks from any geo-locations, it has helped create a new generation of mobile workers. Also, reportedly, from these companies, the efficiencies have increased by almost 37 percent!
3. Collaboration with remote teams
According to a press release by Bain it was found, that top executives lose time over unproductive meetings and responding to emails. 15% of the collective time is spent on meetings which has been on the rise since 2008. (Bain Research)
Organisations are building custom collaborative tools for their teams with specific requirements, bringing teams together from different geo-locations.
Microsoft built a tool called Yammer, to get all the teams at various geo-locations on a common platform. According to an in-house survey, 85% of the workforce believes it has made them more efficient and productive, by removing abject layers of reporting and connecting the work-force in real time with cloud-based architecture.
4. Customer Relationship Management on the go
Services like Amazon Mobile Hub has built-in hooks to connect to popular CRMs like Hubspot, Zoho, Salesforce etc to ensure that employees can connect through their mobile devices. With connectivity on the go on cloud for employees, it makes a job much easier rather than accessing at their workstation. CRM on mobile has enabled Starbucks and Lyft to better serve their customers and establish a competitive advantage in the market. More companies are trying to take their CRM mobile. According to Gartner research,
5. Analytics for prediction
Mobile analytics can help organisations effectively scale up. With implementing data analytics on a B2E app, organisations can know the effectiveness of their automated processes or business functions.
The way to achieve the highest ROI from enterprise applications is to work out how they can be continually improved to make life easier for the user. If apps aren’t intuitive, the uptake in usage won’t be as high and businesses risk employees returning to the old methods they were using before.
6. Reducing IT expenditure
Implementing B2E apps and automating processes at work not only saves paper waste, but also ensures that your company can remain competitive. The increase in efficiency & productivity of employees by mobile automation, far outweighs the cost associated with building such apps.
Adopting cloud based mobile apps to automate processes should be an integral part of any company’s strategy. At present, it seems like the most effective way to increase efficiency and productivity at workplace. With technology rapidly changing, there might be new breakthroughs by which companies can be more efficient, however, at present, organisations should seriously consider ways to introduce mobility at work.
Adoption and challenges-
According to 2017 Gartner survey, it was revealed that 52 percent of respondents have begun investigating, exploring or piloting the use of bots, chatbots or virtual assistants in mobile app development. This is a fairly large number considering that these technologies are at a very early stage for adoption and mass appeal. Gartner refers to these as ‘postapp’ technologies that belong to an era past the traditional apps available on the app stores.
According to Adrian Leow, research director at Gartner, organisations are responding slowly to increasing demand for mobile based applications. The primary barriers to mobile initiatives are resource led- that is, lack of funds, worker- hours and skill gaps.
One of the main challenges of development of such apps is the lack of understanding of the requirements and execution based on strategies adopted by organisations. (Consult an expert for employee centric apps)
Development of B2E apps require a high level of understanding of processes for a business. Care should be taken while building such applications, and a member of the inhouse team should always be a part of the team of developers to jibe them in the right direction and maintain a consistent feedback loop to improve the overall functionality.