Managing Multiple Generations Of Workers, Workflows With Rugged Tablets

By Bob Ashenbrenner, Xplore Technologies

As I often emphasize, worker acceptance and adoption of your mobile technologies can make or break their performance and your operational profitability. If workers choose to revert to pen and paper processes, you risk significant service delays and costly downtime. All of which hurts your organization, channel partners and customers. The same risks occur when workers wait until they're back in the office to submit updates or schedule customer actions. Both are preventable actions – if you have the right mobile workflows available to them on a mobile computer that they actually want to use in the field.

So we advocate for field technician involvement in every technology decision that impacts them. We tell you, our customers, to solicit worker feedback in the mobile solution design, evaluation and implementation processes. Then we encourage you to act quickly on their input. As your partner, we work with you to refine your solution as often as needed to ensure it is meeting your ROI expectations.

But does it meet your workers’ expectations for available on-the-job technology? Do they even really care whether or not you give them an iPad or a rugged tablet, a laptop or a handheld? Not if the mobile computer you do give them works exactly how they expect it to work.