Mobile apps for corporate challenges - what for, how, and why the price is justified
Do you want to free your employees from dull and repetitive tasks, get up-to-date information on your core processes, automate filling of paper forms? Mobile apps can do all that - and you will control the ROI to a single penny, too.
Virtually every company that interacts with consumers through partners, agents or retail chains tries to optimize processes and move beyond office desks.
Alexander Popov, Head of Sales at True Engineering, tells how mobile apps help businesses, and what makes up their cost.
What’s the power of B2B?
The main task of B2B apps is to improve remote customer service and company staff.
Mobile apps enable implementation of company standards, reducing the human factor and training costs thanks to their intuitive interface, logics of an action sequence and foolproof design.
Apps help to reduce info entry time by automatically filling in data via document recognition, QR and barcodes, filming and uploading video and photos.
Video and cognitive technologies along with machine learning are gaining huge popularity because they enable collecting and transmitting a huge amount of useful data within seconds. For example, evaluating cash register workload, goods' representation, staff behavior, condition of the shopfloor or transport.
What effect can be achieved by introducing such solutions?
- Creating new services and products that could not even exist without a mobile app. This helps companies to stand out in their industry. For example, thanks to a mobile app, S7 registers passengers for the flight and checks luggage right in the queue. Clients of VSK and Ingosstrakh can apply for comprehensive car insurance certificates, using a mobile app, due to the technology of video and photo inspection, automatic filling in passport data and car documents. It's all made the process convenient and quick.
- Reducing the barrier against the use of technology and performance standards, cutting costs on acquisition of specialized equipment and training. Everyone now has a phone, and everyone knows how to use it.
- Quick monitoring of production sites or work areas, which enables managing them more effectively.
- Marketing effect of apps and their distribution via Google Play and AppStore as a powerful channel for company product and service promotion.
What is the price comprised of?
Applications of such a class are always complex. They usually consist of a Web portal for back-office staff, integration, backend and the app itself for iOS and Android. Sometimes a company picks only one OS if it provides all the staff with corporate devices.
The function of the web portal is a data processing and managing users and directories; integration and server solution are in charge of integration with the client's internal corporate systems, external resources, and the mobile app.
A fairly large team is working on the project: architects, designers, IOS and Android developers, layout designers, QA, developers, a project manager, frontend developers, backend developers, engineers, etc.
Yet clearly all projects are individual, and therefore each project begins with the solution concept elaboration and preparation of a detailed labor cost evaluation, from which the solution cost is formed.