Back-Office Mobility

#todaysoffice thinking about Paper and the next steps of read... on TwitpicA few times this week, I have had items come up which make me think on the position towards mobility that I’ve taken over the years. Specifically, the posture of doing just about 100% of things via mobile and connected services. This isn’t something that everyone can do, and its been one of those conversations where I’ve had to mature in seeing the point of mobile context more than just mobile ability. In that, its always great seeing some companies and individuals disrupt themselves and find that mobile and connected services are a better route towards getting things done than whatever was in place previously.

…So how does Butcher’s team pull this off? A handful of tech tools are key. “We use Google Apps for email, chat and calendar. We also use Vocalocity, which is our phone system. It’s cloud-hosted, which allows us to take our handsets anywhere. OfficeDrop was one of our last legs in becoming truly paperless. Anybody that we’re doing business with, we’re paperless with them if possible, but not all companies are at that level yet, so they are mailing us items that are important. Instead of sticking them in a file cabinet, we scan them and upload them right to OfficeDrop’s cloud,” Butcher says.

Techs in the field all carry stripped down netbooks with touch screen capabilities. Industry specific proprietary software sends their assignments straight to these laptops. “It’s a little piece of software. It’s got a custom drawn map and a job roster list, and we literally drag and drop the service calls. Once the day of the route comes, the technician turns on his laptop and he’s running a little utility that automatically pulls those service calls right in,” Butcher explains. “Through that utility they can capture all the information they need – what they did, model, serial number and they also can bring up a ticket image on the screen. The customer can sign right on the screen. It’s very nifty.”…

Read the rest of Fred’s Appliance from Web Worker Daily/GigaOm

Have you gone the route of changing all or parts of your office or administrative tasks using mobile? Has this translated not only into organizational efficiencies, but also ministrial ones?

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