By Tom S. Noda
February 1, 2008

Cheap but effective. This is the status of mobile communications today, which small and non-techie businesses could effectively gain advantage from—both physically and financially.

“You don’t need to be a high-tech company for you to benefit from mobility,” says Luis Villanueva, head of integrated services, product management group of Globe Telecom, Inc.

In his talk during the Computerworld Philippines Nov. 27 Executive Briefing on “Mobile Enterprise: Managing Mobility,” Villanueva reveals mobility is gaining momentum in the Philippines, as the local market is adopting more mobility solutions in the enterprise, from sales force automation to inventory management.

A real life example Villanueva gave on how economic and effective mobility is at present, was how a food retail company like Andok’s Litson Corp. is using the Blackberry handheld device.

Engaged in retailing of roasted chicken, liempo (roast pork), boneless bangus (milk fish) and other grocery products in several stores in the country, Villanueva notes the Blackberry helped Andok’s business in terms of manpower, supplies, and productivity issues, particularly in removing hassles of paper-based processes that usually involves approval procedures and routing.

He explains Andok’s developed an application that runs on the Blackberry, and the device since then has been used for sending business information through e-mails.

“On the device, they have a list of their inventory. Instead of filling up a form, their sales men simply encodes inventories in the outlets directly to the device and they are connected via GPRS to the head office, inputting the data and updating the database in the head office real time,” Villanueva explains.

Such mobile strategy has enabled the company to do significant applications beyond email, such as sales executives getting real time access to existing CRM (customer relationship management); field staff fills out forms that updates backend systems in real time; jobs pushed out to field technicians updating forms that used to be paper based; managers gets to approve existing workflow process from the device, as well as access to reports in existing BI system; among others.

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