Today’s satellite and cellular technology allows companies to access remote people, assets and information in ways not possible before. In almost all cases this information is of great value to the company. The value has always been there, but was either too difficult or expensive to access. That has changed. Proven technologies and intuitive applications as well as the decreasing price of cellular and satellite services have made remote information solutions extremely viable.
Yet all too many companies have not yet taken advantage of this value proposition. Perhaps the biggest reason is the perception of sheer complexity. With no prior experience, the idea of adopting such technology can appear challenging. We believe it doesn’t have to be difficult or an overly complicated process to locate and capture valuable remote information, and in the process increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your business all resulting in greater agility, customer satisfaction and ultimately profitability.
Over a series of blog posts, we’ll lay out a straight-forward five step process for identifying and capturing valuable remote information that can be leveraged into both greater business advantage and increased profitability. Above all else, these steps are designed to help you keep it simple and practical when first starting out.
We’ll start in this first post by defining our Five Steps.
Step One - Determine where valuable remote information resides in your organization. There are no pat answers here as each business will offer differing opportunities based on its markets, processes, people, and assets.
Step Two - Assess exactly how you will capture this information. This is as much a technology issue as it is a people and process consideration. Sure the technology might be able to work flawlessly, but will your people be able to use it? Is the information raw data accessible from a database or is it hand written forms that will need to be converted into electronic forms?
Step Three - Develop your plan for applying the right technology for how you operate. Considerations here might include whether cellular coverage available consistently or if your application will need to go to satellite. How user-friendly are the varying technologies and can they be easily adapted to and integrated with your enterprise systems are just a few more examples of what you’ll need to consider in step three.
Step Four - Sanity check the scalability. There’s no sense deploying something that is going to be obsolete before its useful life. This step is all about anticipating and projecting the future needs for your company. For example, how many other remote information projects might be able to leverage this same technology?
Step Five - Implement the solution in a way that is most effective and least disruptive.
Stay tuned for our next blog post where we will start to dig into each of the five steps.
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