Speaking to Faster Customer Deliveries

Whether they are consumers or other businesses down the supply chain, your customers want deliveries faster. Data presented by VDC Research in our recent webinar is evidence that faster delivery is among the leading pressures driving new investment in supply chain modernization. In fact, it is the top pressure among respondents in their survey.

Modernizing your supply chain technology yields no less than three levels of productivity enhancements that build on each other. Here is quick look at each level’s benefit:

• New mobile computers: There has been a flood of new hardware introduced in the last year, much on Android, some still on Windows Mobile/CE, but built on architectures that suggest they could be upgraded to Windows 10, or at least shifted to an Android OS. The power of these new devices offer awesome, high visibility displays, powerful data capture and several connectivity options. Altogether, the latest generation of mobile computers will open the throttle for workers to go faster.
• Intuitive app experiences: Flatten the learning curve for new and seasonal workers, and give all your workers an app experience that fast to learn, and faster to navigate. Bringing your existing web apps or telnet clients to a touch-friendly user experience is easy with Velocity. Think about it: Workers can tap and swipe their way through apps faster than the “hunt and peck” method of keyboard typing. Through faster app navigation, workers pick product faster, which helps orders ship faster.
• Add voice: The only thing faster than the tap & swipe experience is to eliminate the need for workers to read or touch a device screen at all. Speakeasy for Velocity takes productivity to yet a higher level, bringing the power of voice enablement to these latest generation mobile computers. Task steps are spoken to the worker, whose feet never need to stop moving to read the device screen for instructions. Workers can also speak data into fields within their Velocity-modernized app, so they can use the data capture method most logical for any step in their workflow. Sometimes barcode scanning makes most sense, voice may be best for other steps in their task. Check out this previous post for more on the value of voice on Android.

It may seem obvious that you can expect a productivity boost when upgrading to a new generation of mobility (or else, why would you make that investment?). However, when you are chasing a goal of getting orders into the hands of you customers faster, you want to ensure your investment delivers all the productivity you can get.