Information Technology Reference
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22.4.1 Mobile Business Processes
Processes can be decomposed to smaller subprocesses and viewed at lower
levels of detail. The lowest level subprocess is an activity with a well-defined
input and output. Mobile business process, according to which mobility is
given for a business process, when at least for one of the process activities
there is externally determined uncertainty of location and the process needs
cooperation with external resources for its execution. I will discuss this in
more detail in one of the later sections of this chapter. To simplify the afore-
mentioned definition, a mobile business process is one that consists of one
or more activities being performed at an uncertain location and requiring
the worker to be mobile. Such a process can be supported by mobile systems
to increase process efficiency. For processes that are supported by mobile
systems, the term mobile-enabled business process is more appropriate to
differentiate from a mobile business process.
22.4.2 Mobile Enterprise Systems
Mobile systems can be beneficial across a number of processes in most busi-
ness areas. Large corporations are embracing mobile systems in almost all
major areas of business such as sales, procurement, warehouse management,
and so on. A number of mobile solutions available in the market are truly
enterprise encompassing in nature as they fully integrate with the exist-
ing enterprise systems and bridge across major processes of the enterprise.
Companies like SAP and Oracle offer mobile solutions that build on their
existing enterprise systems offerings, primarily ERP, CRM, and SCM appli-
cations. These solutions address mobility in areas such as sales, field service,
procurement, supply chain, and asset management.
Mobile applications can be used to redesign or improve processes at a spe-
cific activity level (e.g., e-mail) or can be used to mobile enable large end-
to-end processes that cut across functions (e.g., procure-to-pay processes).
Similarly, mobile applications can be utilized for most processes in sales,
supply chain, asset management, and plant maintenance. Systems that
mobile enable core processes and key activities across multiple functions in
an organization can be seen as mobile enterprise systems. Mobile enterprise
systems can either be enterprise systems extended to support process mobil-
ity or separate mobile systems integrated with existing enterprise systems.
There are two key aspects to a mobile enterprise system. First, the mobile
system should support one or more core business processes, and second, it
works on the existing enterprise data.
As discussed earlier, the drivers for process mobility are location uncer-
tainty and user mobility.
As most sales and service staffs are highly mobile with activities carried
out at external (uncertain) locations, these areas make a strong case for
mobile systems. With mobile systems, the sales and field service staff can
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