Getting there may be half the fun, but it’s only a first step for companies looking to parlay the tracking and location capabilities of GPS into useful mobile applications.
While GPS technology may provide an answer to “Where’s Waldo?” it is a bit trickier to pinpoint what Waldo or any other mobile worker is doing once they arrive at a destination and interact with customers.
“It really becomes an applications integration problem,” said Ananth Rani, senior vice president of products and services at Xora, a supplier of mobile resource management (MRM) solutions.
Challenges include accurately capturing information at the customer or job site, tracing deliveries manually or automatically with RFID tagging and logging events that occur before, during and after the job is completed. In short, everything relate to the interaction “last mile,” Rani noted.
State transportation regulations and labor union contracts and restrictions can also impact the use of GPS and MRM tools. “Chicago has a pretty tough union, for example, which states that when you go to lunch the tracking on a device be turned off,” Rani explained.
Other hurdles include difficulties for wireless carriers in selling and supporting MRM applications, even though they provide the communications backbone for these services; problems integrating slick GPS-enabled software with antiquated back-end systems; and a scarcity of ‘out of the box’ mobile applications solutions.
Challenges and potential roadblocks for location-enabled and handset-based MRM solutions are, oddly enough, overshadowed by sunny forecasts that predict a $1.6 billion North American market by 2013, according to a report just released by Frost & Sullivan.
This optimistic forecast is supported by the advantages and promise of MRM — including an attractive ROI, increased productivity, competitive advantage and a way to extend automation and improvements in business processes out to the field, analyst Jeanine Sterling noted in the report. “The current MRM market is very underpenetrated, and substantial MRM growth is expected across all sectors,” she added.
More than 550 million GPS-enabled devices are expected to ship by 2012, according to ABI Research This increasing number of GPS systems as well as the further development of “cooperative” wireless technologies such as WiMAX should fuel the growth of MRM applications, the company reported.
Next page: Beyond bricks
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Beyond bricks
But GPS technology is really just the scaffold, say people on the development side of MRM tools. The real benefit comes from extending brick-and-mortar applications out into the field, noted Robert M. Juncker, CTO and founder of Gearworks, another maker of location-based applications.
The traditional dispatch model of one person orchestrating the activities of everyone in the field is no longer sufficient, he said. Instead, everyone is involved in the information and supply chain process — even customers.
MRM tools are used to provide shipment and delivery updates, alert key people of schedule changes, interact with people at the customer site and provide seamless field interoperability.
“This has really flipped the whole supply-chain model,” Juncker said.
All of this information is just so many numbers, however, until applied to some real world challenges such as the price of a gallon of gasoline. Typically, a delivery truck will consume a gallon or more of fuel per hour waiting to unload products at a customer site.
“As they’re sitting in a parking lot, they’re chewing up fuel, which eventually adds to the cost of delivering goods,” Juncker claimed. Providing regular alerts and updates to customers allows them to adapt their schedule and reduce the amount of idle time, he noted.
Tracking workers and their activities may be the current bread-and-butter occupation of MRM technology, although that job description may change dramatically as companies add RFID, temperature sensing and even motion-sensing systems to the mix.
Tracking people is of little use “if you are unloading the wrong goods at the wrong dock,” said John Beans, vice president of marketing at Blue Vector Systems, whose clients include a major national retail chain.
“If the right products leave the distribution center and the right stuff is unloaded, you now have the ability to send an alert and tell people an item has to be placed or replenished now,” Beans explained.
Waiting game
Sounds like a plan, although many businesses may be bit reluctant to commit right now. Concerns over the next year or two include integration with back-end systems, spotty cellular service, limited handheld device options and rumors of an impending shakeout in the MRM solutions market, notes the Frost & Sullivan report.
Businesses are still on the fence about MRM and its benefits and unable to picture GPS capabilities beyond location tracking.
A high total cost of ownership, lack of control, privacy concerns and questionable user experiences also play into a user’s decision to put off until tomorrow what the vendors say will help them today.
MRM critics also maintain that too much information is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to identifying trends and taking quick action.
“At a certain level of the enterprise, there is difficulty in slicing and dicing information and identifying patterns within that data,” Xora’s Rani said. He sees a definite need for capable business intelligence tools in addition to MRM solutions,
“”You have to have context,” said Blue Vector’s Beans. “It is more than just seeing if something comes across the doorway that is supposed to come across the doorway.”
“You’ve got to have a smart system at the edge because you can’t send an SAP back-end junk,” he added. “But if you are not preventing and correcting mistakes then you are not helping anything.”
