Four insights (and 250 different data points) you need to keep your mobile devices in working order

Whether you have 10 devices deployed across your organisation or 10,000, I suspect it’s hard to see how well each handheld mobile computer, tablet, and printer is performing. You may not even be able to tell if they’re online, offline or in the possession of your workers.

For all you know, a random stranger may have picked up a rugged tablet left behind at a job site and is working to track down the owner right now. My guess is that you lose 5-15% of your device fleet every year on average, which we know has a direct impact on worker productivity and on their overall return on investment (ROI).

If even a single device becomes unavailable, someone – most likely a front-line worker – must stop to either troubleshoot or grab a replacement. Even if the disruption is short lived, it’s still a disruption. A workstation – or entire department – could go unstaffed. An entire workflow might get backed up. And that worker’s productivity level automatically declines, assuming only one person is directly affected. If others have to stop what they’re doing to cover, overall business output can start to decline on a broader scale.

So, what are you to do?

Short of hiring a large, full-time staff to just stare and monitor a device analytics dashboard all day, there is a smarter way to approach device management. It starts with a mobile application programming interface (API).

Opening the line of communications with devices gives you direct visibility into their status

There are dozens of APIs available to help you take action on the volumes of detailed information related to device health, availability, utilisation, and support collected from enterprise-grade mobile device software, battery, and components, as well as service and repair systems.

And as my colleague Dan Quagliana, Senior Product Manager for Zebra’s VisibilityIQ solution recently explained, these APIs are designed to give you a deeper and more customised view into your business than what you might have with standard device management services that can only access publicly- available Android™ APIs and data points.

For example, Zebra ingests over 250 machine-level data points from an intelligent edge platform, analyses them and then consolidates them directly into your systems alongside your contract-level support/repair data. Then, within seconds, anyone on your team can confirm an application’s responsiveness or utilisation as well as device-level disruptions and usage thanks to the APIs.

You can also retrieve other real-time and historical status details, such as battery swap activity, WLAN signal strength, and even predictive states. Plus, the APIs give you flexibility to incorporate this data directly into your systems to automate actions, such as purchasing new batteries or assigning a resource to replace one that is dropping below an acceptable performance threshold.

This makes it so simple to systematically and proactively check the health of every device, every day. More importantly, it makes it possible for front-line workers and others in your organisation (i.e., procurement) to play a central role in optimising device usage, which is critical to maintaining operational continuity when people and facilities are geographically dispersed.

These APIs help to yield immediately actionable insights directly in your management systems. You can program your applications to automatically send workers clear-cut guidance on the time-sensitive actions they must take to avoid a device failure – or even degradation of performance. In some cases, workflow optimisation will be necessary. Other times, a battery or entire device might need to be replaced. Either way, the proactivity elicited by the automatic ingestion and analysis of this aggregated cloud-stored data will prove extremely valuable, especially considering the correlation between device and worker/workflow performance.

Remember: You don’t know what you don’t know… unless you are checking on your devices daily

Every organisation should know:

• what assets it has online and in the storeroom.
• where its assets are currently located.
• the health of every asset.
• how – and how much – each asset is being used.

Without this information, it becomes difficult for procurement to know when it’s time to reorder batteries, labels or printer ribbons. And front-line workers won’t know when device batteries need to be pulled from service (unless they completely die). It’s also hard to keep devices online 24/7 if you can’t see their current status, which is hard when there are practically indecipherable charts, graphs and color-coded icons bombarding your IT team’s monitors. Even though there’s a lot of data there, they may only be seeing a fraction of what’s really happening with each device or the fleet holistically.

Your team needs the foresight to anticipate and mitigate a host of device issues, and that’s a lot easier when your system is pulling in and analysing all the data points needed to fully assess device performance. These APIs allow you to centrally access performance data and see what’s happening at a holistic level – even if all your mobile computers and printers are geographically-dispersed devices.

The information needed to make an accurate assessment is no longer ‘hidden’ in separate places across your operation. Workers can stay online and productive, and your IT team can stay on top of your entire device fleet in an efficient, proactive manner.

If you need a more complete or customised picture of your business, or you’re looking for a way to automate the distribution of device-related insights, click here to learn about all the new tools available to you.

By Matt Rance, Regional Portfolio Manager Global Managed and Support Services, EMEA, Zebra Technologies.