Managing your mobile workforce can be a nightmare if you don't have a way to keep track of where they are, much less what they're doing. Location-based services allow business owners to see their mobile workforce in real time and identify ways to boost efficiency and productivity.
With companies conducting more and more business on the fly, business owners and managers need tools to oversee a mobile workforce and keep it working. The broad availability of GPS has spawned a generation of location-based services that allow significant productivity gains that were unimaginable a decade ago. Used effectively, these services can not only wring new efficiencies from even the most seamless organizations, but also enhance customer service and improve competitive advantage.
Melanie Kreh, the director of mobile product management for Cbeyond, spoke with bMighty about the value and opportunity location-based services offer to small and midsize businesses. Kreh joined Cbeyond, an Atlanta-based IP managed services provider, earlier this year after a number of years with Sprint Nextel. In February, Cbeyond introduced Mobile Workforce Manager, a location-based services and resource management suite.
bMighty: Let's start by defining what you mean by location-based services.
Melanie Kreh: Most people think about fleet management when they talk about location-based services, but it's more than that and can benefit businesses in a variety of ways. Location-based services allow any business that has a mobile workforce to increase productivity from construction trades like painting and plumbing to anything that has dispatch-type function. Typically, those painters and plumbers are small businesses and they can use location-based services to boost productivity in a variety of ways.
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bMighty: So break down the benefits of location-based services.
Kreh: There are really three buckets to the value proposition and they're all around improving productivity and the time spent managing a mobile workforce.
First, there's resource management. Location-based services can help a business better understand where its employees are and what they're doing. That can make your dispatching more efficient by improving routes, calculating how long particular jobs take, not dispatching workers across town, and understanding where your resources are. It allows you to identify pain points and inefficiencies.
Second is data accuracy. A location-based solution can automate time sheets, job logs, mileage records, and fuel costs. That allows paperwork to be completed more quickly -- you don't need to wait for a worker to file their time sheet or remind them, but it also improves the accuracy of the information due to illegible writing, fudging the numbers, or workers guessing inaccurately about their time.
The third bucket is cost containment. Not only do workers need to take time to fill out time sheets and job logs, but someone in the office also has to enter that information into QuickBooks or some other system. Saving that time can be significant. It also helps with dispatching, to make that more efficient so you're spending less on fuel and your workers are spending more time on projects that bring in revenue and less time driving to jobs, finding job locations, and talking with a dispatcher.
bMighty: Where are we on the adoption curve for location-based services, specifically for small and midsize businesses?
Kreh: To be honest, I'm not sure what the overall adoption curve looks like, but I don't think that SMBs are particularly behind enterprises. It's really starting to take off across the board -- businesses of all sizes need to drive productivity, and location-based services offer a way to do that and to differentiate yourself. The tipping point was really the widespread availability of GPS. Now that most phones have GPS capabilities, it puts location-based services within reach of almost any business.
Next Page: The Sweet Spot For Getting Value From Location-Based Services
