Fusion5 was recently honoured with a global Oracle Process Innovation award for our mobile applications. This award was achieved due to the good work that our team has been doing to extend ERP solutions with our best-in-class mobility applications – but also thanks to our forward-thinking customers who embrace mobility as a source of competitive advantage. These apps essentially mobilise core business applications, allowing customers to derive strong business value through using existing ERP functionality in the field and within the supply chain.

This really got me thinking… why aren’t more businesses embracing mobility to supercharge their ERP and WMS systems? 

There are many ways in which innovating systems and processes with mobility can help businesses become more agile, make better, more-informed decisions faster, reduce risk, and increase data accuracy. But for me, the top three reasons why I think mobility should fit into any business with ease, while making a huge difference to staff, and the all-important bottom-line are…

1. Real-time Visibility - when managing stock, visibility is essential. Anybody making operational decisions needs to understand the current state of their inventory across all of their sites and external to the organisation. So too do they need to have accurate asset information, and to recognise when assets need servicing or repair. This has a direct bearing on decisions around forecasting, purchasing, resourcing and more.
   
   
2. Data Accuracy - whether it’s in the warehouse, out in the field or in a retail store, by entering information only once you immediately boost efficiency and accuracy. If your business system is aligned with a mobile app, your workers can use a combination of smartphone apps, ERP/WMS systems and barcode scanners to track assets, look up historical data to identify potential problems and allow for real-time updates. With these tools in place, organisations can establish alerts when assets expire, digitise their cycle counts to ensure they always have necessary assets and automate many facets of inventory management. Upgrading these processes with the support of mobile technologies can go a long way in empowering organisations to make their workers more productive and drive efficiency gains.
   
   
3. Leveraging Existing Investments - Enable real-time, bi-directional information exchange with your current business systems. You don’t need to replace and invest in a new ERP or WMS, which is expensive and a huge disruption to your business. Simply enhance the systems that you are already familiar with and take advantage of new technologies such as Android devices within weeks – all without investing in expensive and time-consuming upgrades to your core systems. What’s more, mobilising your core systems allows you to harness data external to your organisation that brings competitive advantage such as IoT.

If you have been wondering ‘how to make things better’ when it comes to data visibility and accuracy, and want to save time and reduce costs, then get in touch. I believe wholeheartedly in ‘making things work for you’ and that doesn’t mean throwing things out and starting again! 

A small tweak here, a bit of automation there, and dash of innovation to stitch things together in a more effective way is often possible – it just depends how you think about problem solving.

So are you ready to haul yourself out of the technical mud, and get mobile?

Kurt Pretorius
Mobility Solutions Manager
Fusion5