Ways IBM Maximo Anywhere Helps Mobilize Your Workforce

The current pandemic situation has forced several organizations to operate remotely. However, though we tend to relate the term “remote” with “working from home” almost instantaneously, there is more to it.

It is more about letting your employees work independently without having to depend on the in-house infrastructure. This is where the concept of a mobile workforce comes in.

A mobile workforce is one wherein your employees are connected with the help of mobile technology. This idea goes beyond simply being able to work from home. With the advancements of mobile devices, onsite workers are easily able to accomplish fieldwork that may have needed them to visit the office every time.

The mobile workforce intends to maintain productive employees even when they are not in the office. That is, they can remotely access software applications and data as they will be doing when in the office.

Studies show that 71% of businesses that offer flexible work schedules believe it to be a major reason to own an augmented talent pool.

What Are the Challenges Faced by Organizations to Mobilize Their Workforce?

Though mobile applications are being used massively across industries, organizations grapple to decide about whether to purchase a mobile app, develop one, or choose a combination of both.

Getting a fully-developed mobile app to serve all your business requirements may not be possible. This may push you to go to multiple vendors and obtain one or many customized applications based on your needs.

However, maintaining these applications will also need expertise. You may need to continuously depend on a third-party vendor to maintain these apps.

Furthermore, your employees should be able to accomplish tasks daily, securely, even when they are away from the office.

With the BYOD trend, employees tend to use devices of their choice and expect the same kind of experience across different types of devices. Therefore, this necessitates your organization to support a wider range of devices like wearables, ultra-books, and other portable devices.

These prove to be a few of the major challenges you may face when attempting to mobilize your workforce.

Why Should You Focus on Mobilizing Your Workforce?

Here are a few major benefits you can realize when mobilizing your workforce.

Facilitate better team collaboration and communication. Cloud-based apps let your employees connect irrespective of their geographies. This also helps the centralized management of inventory assets, applications, configuration on devices, and policies.

A mobile workforce has an increased bandwidth that helps them make data-driven decisions. This helps in faster resolution times and reduces downtimes/risks.

When employees use mobile platforms, it reduces the operational and infrastructural expenses along with real estate overheads.

What Are the Advantages of IBM Maximo Anywhere?

IBM Maximo Anywhere is a next-gen mobile solution that allows the integration of capabilities from your assets and facility solutions. It enables the development of a single-vendor product for boosting the productivity of your employees.

To add on, this mobile application works even when your employees are disconnected. Built on the Worklight platform, Maximo Anywhere delivers instant access to critical business data securely from smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.

The best part of it is that you can customize the interface and create your mobile applications. This offers you a single tool that takes complete charge of your enterprise mobility.

Maximo Anywhere allows your employees to access critical data regardless of the network connectivity. In the case of being connected over the internet, you can instantly update the status of work thereby providing business stakeholders with the progress on tasks and asset conditions. On the other hand, in the absence of an active connection, you can still access an intelligent database on the devices.

Additionally, Maximo Anywhere comes with full bar-coding and RFID capabilities. This helps in efficient work execution and better inventory tracking. Furthermore, Maximo Anywhere allows you to make the best use of device-specific capabilities like voice-to-text technology and camera, instead of an integrated barcode scanner.

Also, this integrated solution helps in managing mobile assets and maximizes returns in capital investments. The solution is in line with Maximo Asset Management Scheduler. This helps in streamlining field-based work processes with capabilities like:

Work order management to efficiently manage the execution of work. This includes submitting actuals, generating follow-up work, and assigning it to the nearest field technicians.

Field workforce management to view and execute optimized service routes and work that has been assigned.

Materials supply chain management that helps in controlling stocks, rolling out truck stock, handling inventory issues, efficiently directing reorders along managing purchase orders and receipt of materials.

Management of assets that records the address of premises, work, time, and material details, allows viewing specific locations on the map. This provides appropriate directions to the technicians thereby improving their productivity.

How Do Capabilities of IBM Maximo Anywhere + IBM Worklight Help?

Maximo Anywhere has been architected based on the Worklight platform. Therefore, you can configure Maximo Anywhere and leverage the capabilities of devices like GPS and camera. You can also easily connect with backend data, applications, and cloud services. This helps to introduce improved mobile capabilities to your organization.

Yet another commendable capability of Maximo Anywhere is that it offers you improved visibility and control over critical business data to better align your business objectives with goals. It also helps in:

• Maintaining a smarter business infrastructure
• Improvising the quality of customer service provided
• Boosting the return on assets
• Allowing close adherence to compliance
• Controlling risks
• Improving asset performance

Maximo Anywhere can be customized to meet industry requirements that include:

• Federal
• Utilities
• Oil and gas
• Mining and metals
• Manufacturing
• Life sciences
• Healthcare
• Nuclear power
• Transportation
• Communication service providers

Wrap Up

Undoubtedly, looking out for better ways to collaborate remotely has become the need of the hour. However, the present-day business challenges demand much more than simply allowing employees to work from home. It is cardinal that employees be able to work irrespective of their location while having complete access to critical business data and resources.

Hopefully, this post elaborates on the capabilities of IBM Maximo Anywhere to enable businesses to maintain important aspects like inventory data and updates at their fingertips.

If you need further clarifications on how we can help you implement Maximo Anywhere for your business, check out our website for the details, or feel free to contact us!