Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) – Examples & Challenges
Anurag Jain
Last Updated on November 25, 2023
There’s an additional expectation that every employee has from their employer today. The expectation is to provide useful tools that can support them during job hours. And why not? These tools are proving to be of great importance throughout the day. I think it’s a good time for me to introduce you to this term, mobile workforce management.
Mobile workforce management (MWM) refers to a particular section of software/services that can be utilized to manage employees working outside the company premises. This category of software is more likely to be used to manage the field team. Think of Uber, how do they manage their team?
The whole idea of workforce management software is to allow a company to change the ways that they utilize their employees in key operations. Think of a scenario where you can enable your employees with a strong and useful mobile application.
Let’s have a look at these MWM examples
1. Apple’s Bug Reporting App
Employees at apple have access to exclusive apps that are meant to be only available to them. Using these, the employees are able to send useful insights and feedback. The result? A systemic list of bug reports. These reports can help the company find potential bugs quickly before they become serious.
2. Family Dollar’s Cash App
This app provides quality surveys to district managers for each store that evaluate layout, employee behavior, and pricing to ensure every location delivers a satisfying customer experience.
The following is Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, diagnosis
The heart of what is happening today is that digital technology is penetrating the real world, making new things possible, and introducing new risks.
These apps are designed to empower employees in ways that are most effective for the company’s unique daily needs. They have changed the ways in which employees go out into the field and deal with customers, be it to deliver a product or service.
Challenges
We are in 2018 and the reports say that by 2022, 50% of the global workforce will be mobile. Do you think the businesses are ready to handle this tech-savvy generation? Let’s see what are the challenges being faced by mobile workforce management.
- Privacy and Security
What’s the biggest concern faced by the industry? Addressing the privacy of its users. After all, this is something that can make or break your business. Look at google, apple, and other tech giants, they take privacy and security very seriously. This ultimately helps them to build trust.
Taking these privacy concerns into account, data privacy laws all over the world are emerging. When it comes to the mobile workforce, security is something that we can say needs to be addressed.
- Scalability
Having scalability in business enables you to shed load off your shoulder so that you can utilize time building your business instead of working in the business. But how do you do this when it comes to workforce management? Because finding a scalable plan here is difficult due to the scarcity of business models.
- Providing Right Tools
Today, every employee has an additional expectation from their employer. An expectation is to provide useful tools that can support them during job hours. But, maintaining open communication with everyone in your company can be difficult with a distributed workforce.
To meet this expectation, we need to use a reliable chat for synchronous communication with a trustable document storage facility.
- 24/7 Connectivity
Though we are living in an interconnected world, there are times when there are network failures. When your staff is scattered in various directions, overcoming network failure and connectivity issues becomes one of the key challenges.
Have you encountered any other challenges? You can share them with us. We would love to list them here. You can provide solutions as well 🙂
The Future Of Mobile Workforce Management
Mobile Workforce Management or MWM is a kind of software and related services which is used to trace and locate the employees of the company outside the company premises and this is mainly used in the management of field teams. The MWM generally deals with the obtainment, deployment, and administration of mobile devices, applications, and Computer software, and along with this, they also have to trace the activities, logging, and other kinds of communications of the employees.
Since the terminal goal of the field service organization is to efficiently close the work orders, render customer satisfaction, and because of the MWM, all these things have become much smoother than they ever were. The digital landscapes are growing daily and in the present era, it has become very critical for the organizations such as MWM services and mobile field services to get their job done comfortably. How? Because traditional field services plot involves the customer appliance/ equipment, the customer communicates with the helpdesk and dispatches the field service workers but because of MWM, everything has grown to a great extent.
The future of mobile workforce management is steadily looking forward to numerous advancements in terms of technology that will truly help the everyday lives of the field workforce.
The Cloud and Integrated Applications
The clouds and IoT are the key factors here that are shredding down the walls of resistance. They are composed in such a way that the ecosystem support and enables organizations to change the way they want to work with the help of mobile solutions.
In the future, organizations will be able to choose the way they’d want to work.
The Importance Of Training
Companies have traditionally relied on professionals to have all the knowledge to fix any kind of problems in the field. But today is it necessary to hold training programs in the fields so that the efficiency of the field workers shall increase and they can start operating in a much more efficient manner. That will help them in allocating the resources and ensure the effective utilization of the same.
Real-Time Visibility
As they say, the most important assets of any organization are the people working for them. And MWM gives organizations the ability to monitor their most valuable asset on a real-time basis. And if anything makes any kind of problem, then, it can be fixed spontaneously.
Because the information is constant, using the MWM will update the working and results in a better way as well.
Have an idea? Contact us and discuss this with our experts.
