Three Tips for Improving Your Mobile ROI (Continued) Your mobile project will be the coolest thing you've done at work since that episode with the gorilla suit (you thought that was a secret, didn't you?). But that's no reason for your tight-wad VP to bankroll it. It needs to be driven by business needs and not technology, measured against objectives you define in advance, and designed with and for your users. Mobile projects have three unique qualities that set them apart from anything you've done in the past: every user behavior is brand new, every assumption based on what worked on a PC must be challenged, and every rule about how work gets done must be broken. Read on for three tips that will guarantee if your project makes business sense it will get funded. Tip #1: Identify how the solution will save you money - then go two levels deeper. If you'll save money by increasing technician productivity, figure out how increased productivity saves money and what productivity savings you can realistically expect. An example: take the case of a customer in the healthcare space with 100 mobile technicians that each closes one additional ticket per day with Aeroprise. Follow this increased productivity two levels deeper to discover the real ROI. Without adding more technicians, this customer now closes an additional 26,000 tickets per year which lowers the effective cost per ticket by 18% and reduces service costs by $390,000 per year. The customer's payback period: 4.5 months. Tip #2: Align your project with management objectives. It sounds obvious but many mobile projects get delayed because more emphasis is placed on the technology than the business benefits. Mobile technology can be used to solve many problems. Orient your project around a high-priority one and relentlessly focus on adding value for the business. An example: recently, the Help Desk Manager overseeing desktop support for 10,000 employees at a government contractor heard senior management discussing a layoff because average tickets worked per day per technician was too low. He reviewed reports, did a ridealong with technicians, and realized the reports under-represented the actual number of tickets being worked by 60%. Why? The technicians weren't creating tickets for "drive-by" requests in the field. He worked with the BlackBerry team to give them mobile access to the Help Desk application. They now create, modify, and close tickets in the field and receive targeted, real-time, two-way alerts as new problems occur. Management allocated additional budget to the Help Desk when they realized how much work was actually being done and the project yielded a six-month payback period. Tip #3: Your analysis isn't complete when your project is approved. Once you sell your project on the benefits of the payback period, calculate it. Again, it sounds obvious but most ROI analyses are ignored once budget is approved. Following through with your analysis improves your ability to predict ROI for future projects and helps you measure and optimize mid-project. An example: a large university implemented Aeroprise for Symbol bar-code scanners using an asset management solution to streamline the physical inventory process. They developed the project when a VP realized too many routine requests by professors for things like classroom PCs were resulting in new equipment being purchased. It turned out, assets were frequently over-ordered due to out-of-date status information in the inventory system. Six months into the project they did a health check using their ROI analysis and realized ordering patterns for classroom equipment stayed the same. After meeting with the inventory technicians, the manager realized what was happening: they were downloading updated asset records from the scanners weekly instead of daily. The inventory manager gave the techs a good tongue-lashing then conducted a training session. The ultimate payback period was eleven months but it would have been much longer if the manager hadn't revisited the ROI analysis. Ah, The Scent of ROI "ROI" as a buzz word goes in and out of style like so much corporate-speak (anyone been "right-sized" lately?) but cost-justification never does. To paraphrase The Bard, ROI by any other name does smell just as sweet. So keep building those models. Then come thank us when you get promoted. Got a good ROI story? Send us a description by email and if we use it in an upcoming newsletter we'll send you a stylin' Aeroprise shirt. Resources Aeroprise Newsletter Archives Aeroprise Newsletter Signup Mobilizing Your Applications: A Primer Aeroprise online demo Aeroprise customer case studies Aeroprise Partner Portal Questions o: +1(866)809-9102 f: +1(650)404-1185 information@aeroprise.com If you'd prefer not to receive future Aeroprise updates please click here. We never share subscriber information with anyone.