McGuire’s Law

Today, in the U.S. (unlike the rest of the world), we celebrate Labor Day. The holiday originated out of the labor union movement and particularly the campaign to limit the workday to eight hours.

With those beginnings in mind, today seems perfect for putting in a shameless plug for Sprint’s new Advanced Wireless Solutions program. This program was officially introduced August 24 and is a great example of knocking down the barriers to capturing the power of mobility in your business.

The “Sprint Advanced Wireless Solutions” program (aka SAWS – although not an official Sprint acronym) makes it easy for businesses to adopt any of a specific set of targeted solutions. By working with leading partners, Sprint can provide a single point implementation for businesses – one contract, one bill, one call for customer care – for the end-to-end solution including hardware, application software, mobile voice and data connectivity, and professional services to help with implementation.

Without SAWS, businesses need to work separately with a variety of choices for devices, applications, and services – evaluating options, testing interoperability, and establishing support procedures. This complexity translates into slow, expensive, and risky deployments that have kept many businesses from capturing the power of mobility.

SAWS is initially accelerating the deployment and adoption of labor-saving and money-saving applications in six areas:

• Field Service Automation: coordinating and automating many tasks associated with scheduling, dispatching, field communication, work order and activity tracking.
• Route Accounting: capturing and reporting sales and delivery data, accessing product and order information, adjusting invoices, tracking product returns, and managing inventory.
• Fleet Dispatch and Resource Management: performing complete lifecycle management on fleets of vehicles.
• Mobile Asset Management: providing location, tracking, accountability, and maintenance data on all company assets including inventory.
• Mobile IT Helpdesk Management: automating all tasks of IT trouble ticket management processes including allocation of trouble tickets, activity tracking, ticket status update and closure.
• Field Sales: providing mobile sales agent and customer relationship management.

Sprint is also working on launching four additional solution sets later this year:

• Healthcare Provider Solutions: automating charge capture and billing systems, providing access to clinical and lab results, supporting electronic prescription ordering with direct pharmacy routing, and enabling physician references.
• Equipment Diagnostics – Equipment Rental: automating many tasks associated with deploying, scheduling and maintaining heavy equipment fleets using telemetry and embedded machine-to-machine (M2M) communication systems.
• Fixed Assets: tracking fixed assets in the field for equipment maintenance, customer service and operations.
• Public Safety Solutions: enabling public safety organizations like homeland security and police.

Mobility is a wonderful thing. As mobility gets built into all products and services, businesses need to learn how to both capture the power of mobility and manage the dangers introduced through mobility. Here are some examples of how the power of mobility is being applied to create competitive advantage:

• Singapore building nationwide WiFi to attract businesses
• Qantas differentiating in Asia-Pac with in-flight connectivity
• RyanAir differentiating in Europe with in-flight connectivity
• Yahoo builds mobility into portal products
• Ford adds mobile internet into pickups
• CBS promoting fall lineup via Bluetooth beaming

Complete list here.