A recent Gartner report suggests that there are two classes of ROI for mobile CRM. The first is a ‘softer,’ subjective set of benefits returning less than 50% ROI annually, but providing greater personal satisfaction with work and increased convenience. The second class is in mobile field service exceeding 200% of businesses’ ROI annually.

Businesses, increasingly recognising ROI benefits, are requesting that mobile solutions deliver reduced downtime, man-hours and IT costs as well as reduced deployment times for new mobile applications.

Increases in operational efficiencies account for much of the high ROI benefit. Service management technicians whose work processes are automated and synced to back end systems, in real time, can save on paperwork and inventory calls, as well as routing and dispatch mistakes. They are able to add an extra job or two each day to their assignment lists in many cases, resulting in more visits being completed.

Companies are seeking to centralise their work order management systems and mobile systems management systems to provide technicians with the ability to manage deployments and configurations independently, allowing specific support for dynamically changing business needs based on location.

With the centralisation of mobile solutions, many customers are achieving significant ROI with the ability to automate other business processes. Importantly, with the two classes of mobile ROI, companies need to have a clear understanding of how to measure their return prior to implementing the solution. By having clear ROI objectives, for example, whether to improve efficiency, reduce paperwork or increase sales, companies will be able to assess the implementation’s success.

Total Cost of Ownership

The number one consideration when looking at the total cost of ownership of a mobility implementation is support. It’s more expensive than the network, devices, applications or software – it’s the biggest piece of the puzzle.

With user queries ranging from ‘I’ve forgotten my password’ right through to high level device reprovisioning issues, if you can use a software tool to make even a small improvement to this process, then you’re going to see ROI. So whilst you can’t demonstrate a specific ROI on the device management itself, you can look at the projected user support costs for a mobility implementation and then calculate the ROI. The classic example of hard to prove ROI is email – can anybody actually prove that deploying corporate email, whether mobile or not, has actually resulted in positive ROI?

How to measure

Few enterprises have developed formal approaches to evaluate and measure the benefits of their mobility solutions. There is a big difference between the ROI of mobility itself, ie, the speeding up of processes by providing a platform for mobile working which is the responsibility of the business manager in charge of the mobile working implementation. The ROI of mobile device management, ie, measuring the actual cost of running the devices is the responsibility of the IT manager.

When it comes to the application, the ROI is determined by the business processes that are being automated; are you cutting things out, speeding things up, or are you enabling someone to generate revenue by doing something they couldn’t previously do without a mobile tool? An enterprise must determine these things.

For example, the person running an engineering team will know how productive his workforce is and what things can be done to the business process to improve that. The IT manager has the completely different task of supporting all those people, and their devices, and will therefore have a different set of criteria to meet. Both are equally important and need to be considered ahead of a mobility implementation.

Many of our customers work with IT consultancies in advance of implementations and will go through such ROI considerations in advance as a matter of course. In other cases, there is a very obvious need to simply replace paperwork with a digital system and some customers will begin a mobility roll out in the knowledge that any solution will be better than the one they are currently using.

It’s very easy to say: ‘Ok, we currently spend four hours doing this; if only we could reduce that to one hour then things would be much better.’ The harder question to ask is: ‘How can I change and improve my business with a mobility tool and even do things I’m not already doing today because it’s too hard for me to do them?’

An example of this would be having a delivery person suddenly enabled to take and process ad-hoc orders on the spot with a customer, rather than the customer having to go back through the company’s ordering system again. Providing a better access channel to your customer could certainly increase your sales sufficiently to recoup any investment in a mobility solution. It may be difficult to predict by how much your sales might increase, but it’s a good example of how you can create extra revenue via a mobility solution by doing something you weren’t able to do before, rather than simply improving a process you already have.

Tangible mobile benefits

There are a number of major companies realising tangible mobile ROI benefits. These companies are able to attribute improved effectiveness, productivity and annual cost savings to the benefits of mobile solutions.

One global fast food chain, serving nearly 50m people in more than 119 countries each day, needed to encourage restaurant managers to reach its high standard of service and customer care. By rolling out a mobile solution, the chain was able to reduce restaurant inspections by three hours (approximately 12% of inspectors reporting time), saving over £140,000 per year. This allowed the chain to efficiently focus on quality, service and cleanliness to continually improve the customers’ experience.

A leading UK provider of power and water to northwest England, needed a solution to manage the laptops of more than 200 clean water inspectors in the field. The water provider recognised the benefits of extending its existing mobile solution to include a new central work system, customer contact system and improved support for field workers to improve business efficiency. With the mobility management system, inspectors were able to reduce the travel to the main depot resulting in improved efficiency, and greater flexibility and freedom. Additionally, the company has improved its visibility with its customers, since inspectors have more time to spend in the field and are able to update and close jobs in real time.

A popular chocolatier chain used a mobile solution to manage 400 mobile devices throughout 380 retail outlets across the UK to automate a number of key store activities, including inventory checks, product refund and damage claims, warehouse transfers and deliveries-in scanning. The store was also able to use its mobile devices during busy holiday seasons as a mobile point of sale (PoS) for out of store selling, thus increasing the retail footprint. The mobile solution provided the chocolatier its ROI by cutting administration costs and improved customer service.

These examples of how companies were able to measure ROI enabled successful implementation that continues to be used throughout their business. With the mobilisation of business critical applications and the improved business processes, the true ROI of a mobility solution will be realised.