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Across the board, my answer is YES.
Even the smallest of SMBs can benefit from internal apps. They don’t have to be custom, there are plenty of great mobile business apps. The one-man-shop selling stuff on eBay in his sweatpants from his basement can probably see increased efficiency if he can pull up all of his orders on an iPad and automate shipping processes. It doesn’t get much smaller than that, and it’s still very reasonable to have mobile app deployment and see ROI.
- Walt
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I recommend checking out Canvas’ solution (www.gocanvas.com/) for the SMB market. It is a very slick solution that addresses the need for productivity (“internally facing”) mobile apps.
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Rephopper – iPad software for sales reps
Salemaker for ipad really works for my business, the sales reps and our clients love to use it, and having all the up to date inventory and customer information on the road with the rep, just makes it so easy, now we receive less phone calls and receive the orders instantly, best of all the orders are readable, not like the old scribble’s that used to come through the fax. I would strongly recommend any wholesale business employing sales people, to give this app a go, it’s free to evaluate and only penny’s to subscribe, we love it!
Steven Sesselmann
Bee JewelleryHere is a link to the site..
http://www.rephopper.com 0 0
Your Small Business Needs a Mobile Application Strategy
Now before I begin, let me add one thing to the PC World article. To quote my good friend Brian Katz, you should also make sure that when you build a mobile app, make sure it doesn’t turn into a “crapplication.” For those of you who haven’t heard that term before, it should be pretty self explanatory. Don’t build an app that doesn’t meet the needs of your/its users. If you build a “crapplication,” you will have wasted precious time, money and other resources because no one in their right mind would ever (want to) use it.
Now, back to the PC World article.
The author, Christopher Null, does raise many a valid point, but his article is focused on a small business building a customer facing application – presumably in order to expand its visibility in the market, as well as provide another sales/marketing channel. That’s all well and good (and unquestionably important), but I’m surprised that the author did not touch much upon the value of internally facing applications (it was only in passing at the end of the article). Now, there are a couple of things we have to consider though.
First of all, we need to define “small business.” Does a five person company need internal mobile apps? Beyond email, that’s certainly an open debate…one that I don’t have any real opinion on. More importantly though, how big is a small business? Is it based upon headcount? Revenues? Most will agree that a 100 person company is still a small business…and I will argue that a 250 person company is still a small business. Can a company of that size benefit from internally facing mobile “enterprise” applications? I would argue most definitely.
In that vein, if a “small business” is going to have internally facing mobile applications, then they will need some system for deploying, managing and removing those mobile applications. This of course falls into the category of mobile application management. We can’t forget though, that any mobile application management implementation must be predicated on having a strong mobile application strategy. That includes both externally and internally facing applications. In fact, if you want to get a primer on developing your mobile application strategy (regardless of the size of your organization), you may want to download this document.