Field Service And Retail Are Leading The Tablet Market
By Brian Albright, Field Technologies
The field service market continues to be a popular place for line-of-business tablet devices, according to new research from VDC Research. In 2015, field services accounted for 2.16 percent of LOB tablet shipments, second only to retail (with 25.8 percent), where the devices are commonly used in point of sale and other customer-facing applications.
Both healthcare (20.1 percent) and manufacturing (19.2 percent) accounted for the bulk of the rest of the market.
Increased competition between consumer and rugged manufacturers, and market saturation have dampened revenue expectations for the tablet market through 2020. The consumer-grade LOB tablet market will grow at a 3.4 percent compound annual growth rate through 2020, while LOB rugged tablets will grow at a 1.4 percent CAGR over the same period. According to VDC, many o the industries with the most potential for growth are those “where the tablet form factor can be leveraged in customer-facing workflows to better allow employees to engage with consumers.”
That’s typical of field service deployments, where technicians are able to use the tablets to provide information to customers, present them with service summaries or invoices, and obtain signatures and payments in the field.
“This renewed focus comes at a time where the impact of mobile technology has set high expectations in consumers’ everyday lives,” says Cameron Roche, analyst in the enterprise mobility and connected devices practice. “Forward-thinking organizations looking for differentiation in a competitive ecosystem are quickly incorporating mobile solutions to help boost customer satisfaction rates.”
The form factor is popular in a number of different application segments, and companies are adopting both consumer-style and rugged devices. Our September cover story describes Miner Corporation’s use of a cloud-based service platform to improve visibility, and a key part of that deployment are the iPads (and iPhones) its internal and contract technicians use in the field.
The Ada County Sheriff’s Office in Idaho, on the other hand, switched from rugged laptops to rugged tablets to provide more mobility to officers, who can now take their work with them – making it easier for them to bring the tablet with them to work at their desk or switch to a different cruiser without having to log on to another laptop.
As VDC points out, a significant portion of the market is shifting to semi-rugged and consumer-grade tablets. In our own coverage, Field Technologies online has interviewed a number of companies that have used Apple’s iPad for enterprise applications, including a major deployment at Southwest Airlines, and more traditional field service systems in place at Horry County in South Carolina, and Emerald People’s Utility District in Oregon. Often, companies turn to the devices because employees are already familiar with the user interface, as Pat Smith of Thompson Electric points out in this Q&A about his own company’s mobile workforce management project.
Previous VDC research found that there is a potentially large movement to update mobile technology among field service companies, with just 44 percent of organizations saying they were satisfied with their existing mobile solutions.
Last year the tablet market experienced its first-ever contraction, with overall unit shipments declining by 2 percent after several years of strong growth. Enterprise shipments of tablets, however, were expected to advance by 12.1 percent annually (this includes both LOB and other tablet applications).
You can learn more about the VDC report, “The Global Market for Enterprise Tablets,” here.
Source: VDC