In my previous post, I touched on why the mobile evolution plays an important role in the ERP realm and how businesses can benefit from deploying mobile ERP. Companies in the Asia-Pacific region, in particular, have the vantage point to be early adopters and lead this next evolution.
Equally important is the deployment of the right solution and one that can meet the requirements of your company’s salesforce team. Choose the wrong tool and your expensive implementation will end up nothing more than a paperweight.
In a recent report, Gartner’s enterprise software research director Nigel Montgomery recalled how a company had acquired 14,000 Apple iPads only to send almost half of them back because it had no idea how to use the devices. It neglected to first determine what needed to be delivered through the tablets before making the purchase, Montgomery said, noting the lack of any user experience in the mobile ERP market.
“People are not looking at the iPad as a replacement for their ERP user interface — they want it as an additional user interface, and still have the core system on their desktop,” the analyst said.
That’s an important consideration in mobile ERP, and SYSPRO has invested a lot of effort in ensuring our customers don’t feel in any way handicapped or hampered when they access our ERP functions via the mobile platform.
The SYSPRO Espresso mobile ERP solution runs on any mobile device as well as desktop, providing users with seamless access to data regardless of which platform they’re on.
SYSPRO understands that many businesses generate significant revenue from ad-hoc sales, so we built SYSPRO Espresso to allow invoices to be created, viewed, and shared on-the-go.
Salesforce employees can securely search and retrieve supplier or customer data, whenever they need to, via a direct link into the company’s backend ERP system. This means the information is real-time, enabling sales people to access accurate inventory updates before closing a deal and ensure better customer engagement.
SYSPRO Espresso also works when users are offline and can’t find a good web connection. They can continue to access the tool and input data, which will be synchronized with the backend ERP system as soon as online access is re-established.
This is an important feature in the Asia-Pacific region where Internet connectivity are known to be often spotty and sales teams often may have to meet clients in remote rural areas.
Plug-and-Play, Tailor-Made Apps
SYSPRO Espresso simplifies the user experience and there are more than 15 ready-made apps on the mobile ERP platform that customers can immediately deploy in their environment, including inventory management, purchasing order management, and sales analysis. It’s plug-and-play, no need for additional development time–perfect for smaller companies that may not have the in-house skills to build their own apps.
However, we also recognize that other organizations may have the resources to develop their own apps, and will want the flexibility to tailor the look-and-feel of their mobile ERP solution to suit their company’s unique requirements.
To cater to this need, SYSPRO Espresso was designed to be highly customizable without requiring advanced development skills and to support development tools that are widely used. We did this so companies can easily develop their own apps with minimal training–this is critical in the region where strong skillsets can be difficult to acquire.
Our customers can easily personalize their user interface and their in-house developers can effortlessly create apps to suit the company’s needs.
Additional SYSPRO Espresso apps are also available via the SYSPRO app store, offering a community in which customers upload as well as download tailor-made mobile ERP solutions their peers have shared via the app store.
SYSPRO Espresso was developed on HTML5 as the generic rendering agent so it’s cross-platform, browser-independent, and device-agnostic. Write the app once, and you can run it on any platform including desktop and mobile. It supports whatever device the user owns, and taps the native capabilities of the user’s mobile device such as the camera and GPS functions as well as contacts list.
In a nutshell, the SYSPRO Espresso mobile ERP is built for companies that want a solution that is plug-and-play as well as easily customizable to suit every customer’s unique preferences. It also offers real-time access to data essential to any salesforce team, and is designed to support a truly mobile workforce.
