Remote Control

By the year 2000, the remote and mobile work force will number over 60 million, according to Gartner Group statistics. Often, these employees are among a company’s highest-paid staff, including traveling executives, salespeople and field service personnel.

Gartner estimates that the cost of systems management for remote and mobile workers is at least 58 percent higher, per user,than it is for LAN-based, “in-office” workers. These are the people who need the most efficient computing resources, yet often they have the least reliable network connections. They need the latest information to be competitive, yet they may be working from obsolete price lists and product information. Their systems are the most vulnerable to damage and theft, yet they are the least likely users to perform system management tasks such as backups and diagnostics.

Software updates received from headquarters may remain uninstalled as field people often don’t take the time to follow what may be a complex set of installation instructions.

Enter the growing field of systems and application management solutions for mobile workers – growing because organizations are realizing that investment in a mobile work force means more than buying a laptop and application software license for each rep. To make the most of a substantial investment, especially with large field sales forces, companies are looking to effectively manage their remote systems and applications, reduce cost of ownership, minimize communication costs and maximize end-user productivity. Remote access solutions reside underneath software applications, acting as the infrastructure of these applications. They are designed to move the systems management tasks away from the end user and back to the IS department, where they belong, and to work in tandem with applications such as technology-enabled selling software, ensuring that the reps out in the field are armed with the most up-to-date product and competitive information.

Software distribution made easy

A striking example of the impact these solutions can have on an organization’s productivity is HBO & Co., based in Atlanta, Georgia. HBO provides software and services to the health care industry. Its sales organization grew from 300 reps in 1996 to more than 800 in 1997. Once a year, the company would bring together all of the reps for three days, flying them in from remote locations all over the world. This was the only window of opportunity for IS to upgrade the reps’ hardware and software and install new applications. The alternative was to e-mail a message to the end user, attach a program update and hope that the rep would follow the complicated instructions and execute them correctly. Deciding that it could not afford haphazard management of its investment in its remote work force, the company installed RemoteWare from XcelleNet. Now, whenever they have an upgrade to a program (they use their own custom-developed sales force automation application), IS centrally sets up a small task to be executed the next time that the rep connects to the central site. When the rep dials in, the software update is automatically sent to the rep’s laptop and automatically installed.

Backing up’s not hard to do

Laptops are vulnerable to damage, loss and theft, so having a backup can mean the difference between business won and lost. Recalls Steve Robb, manager of market development at XcelleNet, “One of HBO & Co.’s reps had three different proposals worth over $1 million each on his laptop and it was stolen. IS was able to restore all the information back up to him up until the last connection he had made to the central site.” Because the product is optimized for remote users, it backs up only the information needed to recreate a changed file, minimizing the connection time needed to perform the backup.

Content management

Reps in remote offices rely on headquarters to send them the most up-to-date information – whether it be price lists, product configurations or competitive data. But if the information is sent out on paper or via fax and the rep is rarely in the office, it soon becomes outdated as it waits in the in-box. Content management is the area that addresses the ways mobile users can be assured of receiving the most accurate, up-to-date information from headquarters.

Using the subscribe and publish model, information can be pushed to or pulled from a sales rep’s laptop. What does this mean? “At the central site,” explains Robb, “they have two options: They can force something down to the rep like something everyone needs, such as a price list, which would be a push scenario, or they can allow the rep to take a look at everything that’s available and pick and choose what he would like to retrieve and that would be more of a content pull scenario.

“For example,” continues Robb, “HBO has six distinct sales forces within the company selling its products and services. The issue there was that they were getting all their market intelligence and pricing via e-mail. Each rep would literally get hundreds of e-mails and would have to sort through what was pertinent to him. With push technology and RemoteWare’s subscriber product specifically, the central site can publish a list of documents and files that are available. The rep out in the field can then look through that list that is replicated over to his laptop and he can choose the things he’s interested in. The next time he connects to the server, it will automatically push it out to him. Every time thereafter, when he connects, the server will make sure he has the most current version of that document. It will automatically push it out to him. That eliminated a lot of the e-mail churn and really increased productivity in making sure sales reps had what they needed.”

Moog Automotive, a St. Louis-based manufacturer of automotive parts, employs nearly 5,500 people and remotely manages a sales force numbering 325 reps nationwide. The company uses the remote systems management software to update its sales force with sales surveys, product bulletins, corporate presentations and policy manuals. Says Dave Kipp, director of sales training at Moog, “The software has eliminated the need for managers to mail out packets of sales material which soon became outdated anyway. Moog sales reps can now access the critical materials they need to do their job right on their laptops, anywhere, anytime. With the press of a button, important pricing sheets, sales data and even software upgrades are updated and sent from the home office nightly.”

Use the Internet as your network

Many companies are moving toward creating intranets, or Web sites accessible only to the company and its employees. It’s become an easy way to publish information that everyone needs access to – especially field sales personnel, who require marketing encyclopedia, pricing or competitive information to put together a presentation or answer an RFP.

Companies with global field sales personnel are well aware that in Central and South America and Eastern Europe, the telephone line infrastructure technologically is quite far behind that of Western Europe and North America. Long-distance calls can therefore pose a problem when transferring data. To avoid the transmission problems and prohibitive cost of long-distance calling, companies that have a large presence overseas have begun using the Internet as their network. A sales rep in Argentina can be set up with, say, a CompuServe account, with a local phone number available to him. The rep makes a local phone call and is able to access the corporate server.

Mail Boxes Etc. found its automation efforts hampered by poor long-distance connections. Although it had set up an 800 dial-up network to push information such as training, promotional and company policy documents out to its franchises, the company discovered that franchises outside of the U.S. and Canada were not getting the materials. “The noise and delays submarined the transmissions,” explains Ray Wahoff, executive director of information services for Mail Boxes Etc.

Wahoff decided to put the documents up on a corporate intranet. But he soon discovered that many of the international users were afraid to use the system and weren’t accessing the documents they needed. Even if they were technically savvy, downloads of large documents took too much bandwidth and time to be cost-effective.

Wahoff turned to XcelleNet’s SessionXpress tool, which is designed to automate session management through scripting. Wahoff’s department programs the parameters that outline what type of data gets sent to whom and when. Information delivery then occurs automatically. The system can be programmed to send downloads during off-peak times, reducing bottlenecks. Data compression technology and automatic disconnects after downloads also conserve bandwidth. Wahoff’s goal is to make the intranet so friendly that users will hardly realize they’re using it. “A franchise owner will come into work, see what’s available to him on the machine, and push on the button that says ‘connect.’ The handshake takes place automatically and disconnects when the download is done.”

Offline Web viewing

Sometimes market intelligence is best gleaned from seeing what your competition is doing. What can be easier than surfing the Internet and reading their Web pages? Having someone else do it for you.

To further reduce the costs associated with being online all the time, companies are turning to offline Web viewing. Web Offline from XcelleNet provides server-side agents that monitor defined Web sites on behalf of groups of remote users and push down the information required. By compressing and downloading Net changes on a scheduled basis, connections between the remote client and the server are brief, reducing remote access charges and conserving network bandwidth.

For example, a field sales force in the pharmaceutical industry can monitor the Web sites of their competition or their customer base by subscribing to a list of the sites they’re interested in. The Web pages are then pushed down to the reps’ laptops when they next connect to the central site. This way they can keep abreast of the latest market intelligence without actually having to be connected to the Internet while viewing. They also do not have to have individual Internet accounts in order to gain the benefits the Internet has to offer.

DataQuest measures the current market for laptop computers at $8 billion and predicts growth to over $10 billion by the end of the decade. The mobile revolution is fueled by technical advances in communications and hardware, providing fertile ground for software vendors who are building solutions for the occasionally connected user. Over the next few years, customer demand, competitive pressures and the growing sophistication of products will require organizations to provide higher levels of field support and service. Managing mobile resources efficiently will become critical to maintaining a high return on investment.