Enabling Workforce Mobility with iPads, Mobile Apps and MDM

The Client

A Houston-based mid-size medical device manufacturer sells their devices to hospitals and doctors throughout the U.S. through their 300+ sales staff. They are planning to expand to international countries.

The Problem

Sales staff rely on PowerPoint presentations and paper brochures to interact with their customers. This greatly impacts the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales process – cumbersome, presentation versioning issues, timely distribution issues, and lack of interactivity. The management made a decision to arm the sales staff with iPads with presentations and videos available on demand to enable richer customer interactions and a smooth sales process.

The client had three primary support goals for mobile device management:

1. Support Processes – Define the support processes that IT will offer to the business surrounding mobile device management – from provisioning, to helpdesk support and finally decommissioning.
2. Technology Environment – Define and build a mobile environment which the IT organization could support in terms of employee productivity, asset risk mitigation, and required support utilities.
3. Enterprise Access– Identify enterprise systems residing behind the corporate firewall, which should be accessible to mobile devices in order to increase the productivity of the sales and marketing organizations.

The evolution of the smartphone and mobile tablet devices to a core business productivity enabling tool is a recent phenomenon. The ability to manage the diverse mobile hardware platforms as a corporate asset has lagged the rapidly evolving app world and need the same level of asset risk mitigation as the laptop platform.

The Solution

Smartbridge led an engagement that focused on selecting the most appropriate Mobile Data Management (MDM) platform. It would provide the appropriate level of content, management tools, and security to enable the client to make the most appropriate content available at all times to the geographically distributed sales staff. Using this platform, Smartbridge implemented the MDM technology platform, processes and people components of the solution.

The scope of the project included the following deliverables:

1. Service Catalog – The definition of services for all supported mobile devices along with Service Levels associated with each support process
2. Software Selection & Implementation – Selection of a Mobile Device Management (MDM) software package to manage the mobile enterprise and provide diagnostics capabilities to helpdesk personnel. Then map the support process to the chosen package.
3. Security Policies – Define security and usage policies that mitigate the risk of both hardware and data losses. This included a data classification policy as well as an acceptable use policy. The data classification policy defined the techniques which must be used to secure corporate data while the acceptable use policy defined the risk mitigation responsibility of employees.
4. Standard Corporate Collaboration Support– Establish a base line device configuration that conforms/supports the security policies as well as provides basic enterprise collaboration capabilities to employees.
5. Training – All support processes were documented in detailed by step-by-step instructions which were then used to train helpdesk personnel.
6. Deployment – An assessment of the current devices was performed to determine the upgrades and process steps required to get all corporate devices to a standard configuration. Then it was rolled out over a time period of one month.

The Result

Our client successfully deployed iPads and content rich applications to their entire sales staff along with the corporate MDM infrastructure to successfully manage these devices. With the introduction of these iPads, the sales personnel gained access to the latest sales presentations and CRM information – anytime, anywhere – thereby greatly improving their sales processes.