Mobile Solutions

VIASAT GeoTechnologies delivers successful mobile solutions to improve your business processes.

With years of experience in delivering mobile GPS/GIS solutions across industries, VIASAT GeoTechnologies can help you get your mobile project on the way, quickly.

For over a decade we have developed a wide range of mobile tools and solutions in partnership with our customers. These mobile solutions are in operation today and are key to maintaining business critical information in organizations of various sizes across various industries.

This paper shares some of our insights about what makes these operations successful, with the hope that you can use this information to get your own projects going smoothly too.

ROI: The measure of success

You are very well aware that the measure of success for you is called ROI (return on investment), and that you have to make sure that the revenues that you will generate or the expenses that you will save on mobile operations will outweight your costs to develop and deploy your mobile solution.

Revenues

The revenues come in various flavors. For instance, Bell Canada charges a rental fee to companies who install cables and equipment into their poles. This can only be effectively achieved by maintaining a proper inventoriy of the poles and their contents.

In a matter of just a few months we have developed a complete system that allows Bell Canada to perform pole inventories and send the collected data to the input gateways of two of their major backend systems. The main reason for the "GO" on this project was that ROI was demonstrated.

Revenues are always based on something related to the business mission, so your business needs is where you should spend most of your own efforts. Remember this so there is a warning bell that rings anytime you are worrying about non-business issues, such as the battery life on a mobile computer. We have seen the most successful mobile operations in partnerships where the organization focuses intensely on its business issues.

Expenses

The expenses also come in various flavors: equipment, software and personal, so you have to account for those in your ROI equations. It is in your best interest to keep costs down and under control, and to find a coach and partner who will help you do that, unless you are already expert at developing and deploying mobile solutions.

Equipment

Equipment (mobile computer, GPS receiver, batteries) is often perceived as a key cost item in mobile operations. Over the years we have evolved a product line of GPS receivers integrated with mobile computers within a range of costs that are accessible to all types of organizations. We have taken care that the equipment runs under any operating conditions. For instance, Smurfit-Stone uses our GPS/WAAS 5000X under dense forestry cover at temperatures well below -25 degrees C (-13 F).

A hidden cost is also associated with the researching of the ideal mobile computer for your operations. Sometimes this research turns into the search for the Holy Grail, and important amounts of money are invested in trials and errors before anything productive gets done. Watch out for this ROI killer.

Software

Now you think you can get lost in evaluating mobile hardware, but what about software ? Have you ever tried to start a mobile operations project but got stuck still after buying the hardware ? Do you know where to start in designing your solution ? Have you overlooked the importance of software in your ROI equation ? Does it all seem too complicated and risky ?

In fact, when you sit down to think about it, mobile software is all really simple. Here are the key ingredients:

• A mobile data collection application integrated with GPS into a suitable mobile computer.
• An operations management software that helps you keep track of field work and transfer data between mobile computers and office computers.
• A QA and data synchronization software application with integrated differential GPS post-processing, that provides a clean bridge between your information systems and the mobile units
• Data integration with IT systems.

Now, the devil is in the details, and you have a very large selection of commercial product offerings to help you perform these tasks. Software cost in your ROI equations will revolve around software acquisition costs, software integration costs, and data integration costs. For instance, it is a cost-saver to model the field data from the information systems data models, but this is often overlooked by beginners.

As mentioned previously, the most successful projects are those where the focus of the organization is on the business processes, rather than the tooling. In planning your mobile operations, you should keep in mind that a mobile software integrator can help you drastically minimize your costs for software.

In practice that all really happens when we form a project team within our partnership with customers. The team self-organizes so that we can together keep the cost of software to a minimum, while maximizing the business value of the mobile solution. This is what we like to see happen really. For instance, we have formed such a team with Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie, where we bring together managers, operations specialists and mobile software specialists to design, develop and deploy a solution within a limited and fixed budget. It all happens very fast and within four months we have something operational on the field, started just from a blank page.

The point here: it is possible to keep the software cost part of the ROI equation down as long as you organize properly for it. On the other hand, you may spiral into increasing costs if you can't assess properly the importance of sound planning of the software development and integration.

People

The cost of personal and travel on the field is going to play a role in the recurring cost equations of your ROI model. Properly solving the equipment and software equations as described above helps a lot in reducing the cost of personal as people, become more efficient on the field.

In addition don't overlook the importance of providing proper training and support to people on the field.

A well designed software solution will also reduce the cost to operate data transfers to and from the mobile units. A poorly designed software solution will inflate the costs of manual operations at the office. For instance, you want all data transfers to be automated as much as possible, all data validations to be performed on the field, any outstanding data validations to be performed in a well identified QA process prior to check-in of data into the central information system, etc.

Making it work

Just as the postman is responsible for delivering mail door to door rain or snow, you want to make sure that the organization responsible for delivering hardware and software will guarantee proper and reliable functioning, and will provide technical support for your operations.

Again, you may elect to supervise all activities related to hardware and software, but that with the potential danger of being caught into a technical maelstrom, instead of focusing on your core business issues. We learned from our real-life experiences of mobile operations that our partners value our guarantee that our solution work, so they can really focus on their business, and leave the technical details to us.

Making it work is also a big factor in your ROI equation: if it doesn't work, then you either have less income then expected, or more expenses. Or both. The best way to eliminate the cost of risk is to shovel it to us. We take upon us that it works. From our point of view this is fine because by experience of the fields operations our risks are low. This is a win-win situation.

Summary

The revenues part of your ROI equations is up to you. We can help in defining and reducing the cost part of the ROI equations so that your mobile operations are successful (meaning a positive ROI). We can do this because we have extensive experience in deploying working solutions for our customers. The key enabler for this is in partnering with our customers, and optimizing how we work together to design, develop and deploy successful mobile solutions.

Learn more about working mobile solutions...

Here are some links to case studies of solutions that we have deployed in partnership with our customers. In all cases the ingredients of success are similar to what we have discussed above.

Case studies:

• Bell Canada
• Smurfit-Stone
• Cogeco
• Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie
• SaskPower