By now the decision is not whether to go mobile, it’s more a question of what applications to facilitate through a mobile solution. With 3.5m people working from home in the UK, an increase of 600,000 since 1997, companies have been forced to review their business processes and become even more efficient.

Mobility has proven in many sectors to be a fail-safe option. The Government’s Gershon efficiency review has set about achieving efficiency gains of at least 2.5% year on year with the support of mobile solutions. In the private sector, efficiency savings of up to 40% are commonplace – that’s equivalent to as much as two man days per week with a reported payback period of just six months. But are we maximising every possible efficiency saving? Are we fully reaping the benefits of mobility across every possible application?

Consider the area of compliance, a highly complex area involving risk assessments, health and safety assessments, and other lengthy audits that vary according to each and every industry sector and the relevant Acts. Traditionally they involve completing reams of paper-based assessments that are frequently monitored and accessed for evidence against good industry practice.

Service management incorporates a significant percentage of the mobile workforce, all working off-site in one way or another, away from the corporate infrastructure, all requiring the assurance of safe working practices. The area of compliance is adding further pressures; further administration and businesses are yet again struggling with the issue of efficiency. Compliance too is an area where employers are demonstrating good and safe industry practice by facilitating them through their mobile processes.

With a reported 1 in 3 construction sites putting the lives of workers at risk by operating below the acceptable standard (this figure arises from The Health and Safety Executive, which carried out 1500 inspections that resulted in enforcement action on 426 occasions in just two months), you can see why employers are focusing on the importance of easing the assessment of risk amongst other important checks to ensure the adoption of a safe working environment.

Failure to focus on easing them and you run the risk of failing to meet duty of care legislation for employees and potentially run the risk of negligence, as employees quote time pressures preventing them to undertake all the necessary precautions. Every day we hear of accidents to employees simply because the right assessment methods were not in place. With more and more work regulations continually coming into effect to prevent such catastrophic accidents, formalised methods of such vital assessments are significantly reducing time pressures on mobile employees, helping them in return to focus on the task in hand.

Consider teams of mobile maintenance engineers who by law are required to undertake power check assessments of their physical plant equipment such as boilers, chillers, lighting and battery conditions at each of their sites. Traditionally such checks were conducted using pen and paper and required various forms to be populated and then later added into Excel for variance analysis by head office.

After automation, the team from a world leading exchange for Euro, short-term interest rate derivatives and equity options were immediately able to reduce the time taken to complete each plant round, which were otherwise taking half a man-day to complete and were automatically alerted to any threatening catastrophic power failure. In doing so, each physical plant round was not only easier, but quicker and effective to alerting danger and in doing so ensured the maintenance of safe working environments for all staff. Any specific work allocation can be automated to an appropriate member of staff, preventing the need to tender to any additional paperwork at the end of a shift.

In the arena of service management, risk assessments play an important part as any site assessment, such as when working at height, ensuring that equipment is correctly installed, inspected and maintained and when assessing the potential impact of the environment at any one site. The key to success is all about information accessibility and when this is presented in the form of a mobile working solution for service employees, the everyday common practice requirement is instantly made efficient rather than a hindrance. Whilst the types of checks and assessments are dependant on the type of work undertaken and the specific risk involved, there are no real limits on data capture requirements from compliance to day to day recordings commonly undertaken.

The ability to effectively reduce travel, administration time and costs, while improving productivity and safe working practices for field-based operations through mobility, that additionally protect the environment at the same time, is understandably an attractive solution. The applications for mobility are virtually infinite and extend to real-time information exchange across the corporate infrastructure, from day to day data capture such as collecting reading, capturing signatures, receiving job schedules through to easing all aspects of compliance.

Mobility especially in this industry is reaping the rewards of communications accessibility. The ability to receive jobs, progress reports and compliance assessments all in real-time and then populate all the necessary job forms and send back to head office, rather than the need to drive and drop off paper-work, is negated. No more hand-written assessments, no more inefficient follow-up or data entry. Mobile compliance altogether ensures efficiency of service for your business and your customers.