How Our Mobile World Was Shaped By The Clock

The world we live in today wouldn’t exist if figures such as Charles Babbage, George Boole, Tommy Flowers, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Howard Aiken and countless others hadn’t wanted to speed up problem solving.

Virtually every computer, mobile phone, tablet, server and other computational device we use today, is here as a result of people believing that technology could be used to help solve problems and reduce manual processes.

Doing things better

Today, it is mobile, big data and the cloud which are at the forefront of helping companies to drive competitive advantages and make improvements to the way in which they operate. Across any industry, there are people focused on finding innovative ways to do things better.

It should come as no surprise that last year, 62.5 percent of employees with a remit for mobile made apps their primary investment. Mobile apps are the front end interface that connect many of the backend technologies that are driving new ways of working, interacting and logging information.

It’s also not just large businesses that benefit from mobilisation. Any sized company can utilise mobile devices, and the apps which run on them, to empower their operational efficiencies. There are countless examples of small cafés and boutique shops using tablet devices as point of sale terminals, where they can manage stock and customer engagement from a single device.

Elsewhere, smaller companies are able to utilise third party apps that provide them with the ability to compete more effectively in their markets. From time management, to expenses, workflow management, meeting tools, productivity and document management, there are thousands of mobile apps that help companies and employees.

When thinking about operations which are unique to an organisation, often creating a custom mobile app can deliver the greatest return and value.

S&D Sealants is one example of a small, family run business, that needed to improve its operations to support further expansion and relieve pressures on admin staff. As a company that installs sealant for many large building contractors, the company’s team of field sealant applicators would have to call admin staff to provide job information over the phone and send information about work done via the post.

Nick Jones, managing director of S&D Sealants looked for an app that could help the company to do this, but couldn’t find anything that would match the companies processes.

“Our business relies on being able to move quickly and invoice within a week of work being completed”, said Jones. “With work taking place on up to 400 sites a week, that is no easy feat. Our existing processes were just too time consuming and we needed to change in order to grow.”

Thanks to a grant from the Welsh Government for innovation, Jones was able to work with a mobile app developer to look at the process and create a tool, based around its operations and systems. The app, which is designed to run on low-cost Android Nexus tablets, enables the field team to enter job information which an in-built costings tool calculates. The invoice can be automatically created, with the added ability to capture signatures from clients face-to-face.

Jones continued: “It was imperative that whatever we created was easy to use and required minimal training to prevent contractors from reverting back to paper. The time it takes us to process an invoice has been reduced from a week to under five minutes. Because of the app, we anticipate that we’ll be able to double our revenue over the next two years.”

Beyond enabling the field team to be more efficient in the field, the impact of freeing up pressure on admin staff means they can focus more on following up on invoicing. This helps the team to focus on growing the business.

Time is often one of the key reasons that companies or organisations will look at mobilisation. The move from typewriters to computers, post to fax and fax to email have all played crucial roles in helping to speed up business operations.

Though saving time can mean employees are able to do more work throughout the day, when thinking about businesses where time is crucial, mobilising can, in some cases help to save lives.

As London’s critical response team, London’s Air Ambulance responds to an average of 2,000 cases per year where patients require urgent medical attention. It’s helicopter can get to anywhere within the M25 in 15 minutes, but any time that can be saved helps its team increase its chance of saving a life or preventing patients from being disabled.

Dr Gareth Grier, London’s Air Ambulance, said, “We typically see six patients whose injuries are so critical that they need additional specialist treatment on-scene before they get to hospital.”

Through working with EE, London’s Air Ambulance was able to utilise 4G and tablets with London A-Z maps to reduce its dependence on paper based maps. Though this did deliver some benefits to its team, there were still further improvements that could be made.

In 2013, EE formed a partnership with Mubaloo for Customised Mobile Apps following research which showed custom apps help companies get more out of mobility. Through the partnership, Mubaloo worked alongside EE and London’s Air Ambulance to look at its dispatch process and identify where an app could make improvements.

In the past, when an emergency was assigned to London’s Air Ambulance, the information would need to be telephoned or radioed through from London Ambulance Service Emergency Operations Centre to London’s Air Ambulance. From there, it was put into a computer and printed off for the team to be dispatched, whilst preparations for the mission took place.

After months of testing to ensure its reliability, London’s Air Ambulance is now using an app that saves, on average, two minutes in its dispatch process. Now, information is sent from the emergency operations centre directly over 4G to a customised app to the ground and air team at London’s Air Ambulance.

Dr. Grier continued: “Even reducing the time we take to get to our patients by 10 seconds could, in some instances, mean the difference between life and death.”

There’s no denying that mobilising operations can help many companies to save time. Time is a critical factor for virtually every company, which is why it would be unlikely to walk into an office and find people using typewriters or writing letters. From the very beginning, computing has been about helping to speed up processes and help take some of the pressures off people carrying out work, freeing up their time to get more done.

Whether companies use third party apps, platforms that provide customisation or build their own apps, they are able to create competitive advantages and drive benefits across the organisation. Sometimes, these advantages will save companies costs, others, they will help to save lives.

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