Google I/O 2015 is over and its time to look back (or forward..). One of the most exciting updates for us for sure is the "Android M" with  launch expected in Q3 of 2015.  F eatures like native support for fingerprint sensors, better app-to-app communication, offline access to maps and new power management features can disrupt the way apps are built and consumed. Conserve with Doze Although the improvement seem to be incremental rather than disruptive, they can have significant impact on how our users can benefit. As our users tend to be on field for a really long time with minimal access for charging, the new battery mode 'Doze' could be a value adder.  With M, Android uses significant motion detection to learn if a device has been left unattended for a while. In this state, Android will exponentially back off background activity, trading off a little bit of app freshness for longer battery life. Native Finger Print Support Next ...

Excellence in Field service is no longer measured by how efficiently a field worker can be scheduled and routed. The focus has shifted to customer satisfaction and companies are focussing on providing collaborative tools for communication now more than ever. As this Aberdeen report rightly points : ‘In 2015, not much moves faster than social media, and organisations have begun to better understand the business use of social to deliver information and resolution.’ With a range of information at hand, customers have more power and have begun to demand improved service. If their expectations are not met, they have social forums to communicate under performance to the world at large. In a September 2014 survey, 82% companies (n=213) indicated that mobility is to be an important strategic initiative for the next 12 months. This continued development has brought to the fore social collaboration with mobile devices that are in the pockets of most technicians. Social collaboration...

A large multinationals’ IT Business Unit in India runs a 24x7 field operations. A team taking care of critical power and cooling systems installed at various data centres across India. It is imperative to have a highly efficient and well-coordinated team in order to meet the strict Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) given the critical nature of their customer operations. The service team needed a mechanism to streamline and manage the new opportunities being identified by the Field Service teams. In their ongoing effort to achieve excellence the team adopted Vitamap’s mEdge for operations in January 2012. All the Field Service Engineers (FSE) are enabled with mEdge the Field Service mobility App. The Call centre team, service coordinators and inventory team are connected to the Field Teams through Cloudtrac a middleware. With this system, Field Team was enabled with: Real time notification of breakdowns to Field Teams Complete details of the issue and customer cont...

After e-commerce, taxi and real-estate, food-tech companies are the flavor of the season. Discerning entrepreneurs are brewing up innovative business models ranging to deliver something edible to your doorstep or office desk. You name it and they deliver it - breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, salads, and beverages. A leading food-tech startup recently found that a product like mEdge, with its location-rich features, real-time connectivity and flexible workflows is a perfect fit for delivery management.Their delivery force is equipped with mEdge giving the co-coordinators and customer service representative real-time information on the status of the order. The co-coordinator is able to locate a given order and ensure lunch and dinner orders are delivered on time.The most common questions that we are trying to answer for our customers are : Where is my delivery boy? Where is my customers food? What is the reason behind rejecting an order at the doorstep? What is ...

Its that time of the year when Gartner starts to publish  “Magic” Quadrants for various categories (Cloud/BI/Security etc). Although this annual affair comes with its share of criticism, it acts as an interesting insight to keep tab on the cloud world developments. Vitamap is a power user of the Cloud infrastructure. We are keen to understand the trends and insights to keep a tab to bring our customer best in class solutions using IaaS. Once again, AWS is the runaway visionary leader for 2015. Full Report   From the report on the strengths: “ AWS is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile, and very responsive to the market. It has the richest array of IaaS features and PaaS-like capabilities. It continues to rapidly expand its service offerings and offer higher-level solutions. Although it is beginning to face more competition from Microsoft and Google, it retains a multi year competitive advantage . ” A note on SLA worth ment...

As the next generation mobility adoption gathers speed in enterprises, its the time for field sales rep to up the ante. A recent Aberdeen Report indicates report 43% of Best-in-class companies report high or very high competency around providing mobile friendly access to backend (CRM/ERP) stored customer and account data , compared with 20% among all others. This insight complements our understanding of how users are adopting mEdge, for field sales rep across varied set of industry verticals. A good number of enterprises are looking to accomplish these key items with mobility adoption. Plan Daily Visits Efficient use of face-time with customer Great conversion rates Collect Feedback during Visit Collect relevant data Insight into customer and competition Create Orders on location Mitigate loss of opportunity Higher Conversions Provide key information (personal goals, merchant details etc.,) Most recent information at hand Better custome...

A recent Aberdeen survey reported that 61% of the respondents indicated Real time data integration between mobile devices and back-end systems as a critical success factor in organizations considered as Leaders. This didn't come as great surprise to us as enabling and making integration simple is at the core of our Field Service Mobility Offering. The Goal of integration is manifold, ensuring real time data to Field users, up to date insight for the managers, identifying/predicting dissatisfied customers and preventive actions. It empowers field executives to take right decisions ranging from identifying inventory availability to order shipping status to complaint progress and in the process taking customer engagement to the next level. For best results, a combination of real time push, batch updates and real time query can be considered for implementation. Interfacing key transaction data (tickets/leads/delivery/orders etc) in real time and preferably exposing slo...