Case study 2

    Identify the problems that businesses in this case study solved by using mobile digital devices.

Owner of TCHO Chocolate, Timothy Childs developed an iPhone app that enables him to remotely log into each chocolate-making machine, control time and temperature, turn the machines on and off, and receive alerts about when to make temperature changes.The iPhone app also enables the owner to remotely view several video cameras that show how the TCHO Flavour Lab is doing. TCHO employees also use the iPhone to exchange photos, e-mail, and text messages.

To access email, contacts, documents, and electronic presentations, General Electric (GE) employees use the iPads. GE’s Mobile Centre of Excellence has developed dozens of iPhone and iPad applications, including industry-specific diagnostic and monitoring tools and business intelligence tools that help decision makers find patterns and trends in large volumes of data. The company’s Transformer Monitoring app helps manage gas turbine inventory and electronic transformers throughout the world, with the ability to zoom in from a global map to a specific transformer and read all of the key performance indicators. To let the service personnel monitor railway tracks and obtain diagnostic information on locomotives, a PDS Movement Planner app is launched.

A Roambi Visualizer app lets Dow Corning executives use their iPhone to quickly view and analyse real-time data from their core corporate system, including sales figures, trends, and projections. When Dow Corning rolls out XIAMETER Web sites across the globe, executives will be able to monitor what content is and isn’t being used whether they are home, travelling or at the office.

More than 1,200 Sunbelt Rental Company employees, including sales staff, field personnel, and executives, are equipped with iPhones to interact with contacts and stay abreast of calendar events. In addition to using iPhones for e-mail, scheduling, and contact management, Sunbelt deployed a custom application called Mobile SalesPro, which ties multiple systems and databases into a single package for the sales team. This application connects to the corporate point-of-sale system, inventory control and management system also the enterprise system which integrates data from many different business functions.

To enable users to stay connected to business and customer data in real time when they are away from the office, SAP has developed a Business One mobile application for the iPhone. The mobile application enables sales managers to receive alerts on specific events, such as deviations from approved discounts, while sales reps can retrieve and update customer records as well as manage their appointments in real time. Managers are also able to check inventory availability and access detailed information about products in stock.