AK Consulting, supported by TFIA brings you; A Supply Chain Seminar for SME’s in the Fashion and Apparel industry. The seminar will be held on Wednesday 22nd April at the Textile and Fashion Hub, Melbourne.

As mobile devices gain a stronghold of virtually every aspect of life—we use them to communicate, play, read, buy, and even to wake up each morning—they have also come to play a big role in the workplace. Mobile devices can be used to perform common office tasks, such as sending e-mail, but they are increasingly being used to gain critical insight into business processes and help companies’ better service their customers.

Organisations are taking advantage of mobile applications in many area of business. It started from areas, such as customer relationship management (CRM), field service management (FSM) followed by enterprise resource planning (ERP) and now business analytics.

Mobile BI Benefits & Challenges

Organisations that wish to incorporate a mobile BI strategy need to consider the benefits and challenges that mobile BI offerings bring to the table in order to set the right expectations, make an informed move toward the adoption of mobile BI, and start the process of conducting a proper software evaluation and selection, and, finally, select the best fit for the organisation’s business needs. Some important enablers of the incorporation of mobile BI technologies within an organisation include the following: 

• Increased mobility of managers, executives, and decision makers
• Need for increased efficiency in the decision-making process
• Need for improved communication between multidisciplinary groups
• Decentralization of many of the data analysis and decision-making process steps, so that data analysis services are delivered in an individual, contextualized, and virtual manner to a wider number of users

 The use of mobile BI applications can bring benefits to an organisation, such as the following:

Accessibility—Location and time are no longer constraints for accessing central BI and analytics applications, and data analysis can be done on a plethora of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Better yet, some mobile BI offerings offer the capability of working with at least some of this data while the user is off-line, due to either signal outages or the need to work in locations without Internet access. Mobile BI offerings also enable real-time data visibility as well as alerting and messaging, providing users with real-time access

Usability—As mobile software and hardware evolve, so do mobile BI  applications. This ensures the functioning of BI services on different types of devices and thereby increases the usability and adoption of mobile BI apps. It also leads to the transformation of mobile BI applications from data visualization tools to complete BI applications for authoring complex BI solutions and enabling flexible data analysis tasks.

Collaboration—As mobile BI applications evolve, they inherit the benefits of collaboration that mobility already contains. Nowadays it is not surprising to see mobile BI applications with comments, instant messaging, and the ability to connect to corporate collaboration platforms with ease, serving in some cases as the first interface for collaboration for top and middle management teams.

Integration with operations—Mobile BI technologies, along with other technologies such as real-time data analysis and in-memory systems, have the potential to close the gap between operations and analysis, thereby changing the traditional approach of keeping online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) as separate systems. Users might use mobile BI solutions for interacting with third-party transactional systems and reviewing specific data and even for making specific transactions in a productivity system such as an ERP.

These and other potential benefits can significantly transform the way organisations deploy, use, and consume BI and analytics services—extending the use of BI across an increased number of users and lines of business within an organisation.

On the other hand, implementing mobile BI solutions within an organisation is not without challenges that must be overcome before the full potential of mobile BI can be realized. Some of these challenges involve selecting and deploying a solution that:

• Enables integration within an organisation’s underlying information technology (IT) infrastructure;
• Avoids discord between systems, minimizing the need to make special modifications to the underlying BI, security, and software provisioning platforms
• Ensures the proper implementation of new mobile platform paradigms, such as BYOD and service-agnostic initiatives, that automatically adapt to any device;
• Ensures the right balance of access-restriction to data, with role-based and user-oriented configuration and administration capabilities; and
• Comprises the right set of features, functions, and capabilities for the organisation, providing the necessary elements for enabling scalability and the organic evolution of mobile BI initiatives, scalability, and for performing BI operations with the least disruption and the highest possible productivity