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Q: How can I manage my mobile staff more efficiently?

Apr 06 2009

Answered by: Chris Lindsay Ask a question

One of the key benefits of a mobile office environment is increased productivity, as you can work at home, on the move or even at client premises.

However, you need to ensure that your employees can access the correct information from one central database. This ensures everyone is accessing the same content and means your team has a single view of your customer updates.

Many companies now provide hosted services, which enables mobile workers to maintain client records and update information remotely. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications can also be downloaded and built with a 'multi-tenant' back end, enabling multiple workers to access a shared data model. This includes financial, human resources and email applications.

With the developments that have been made in hosted solutions over recent years, managing mobile staff is no longer a daunting task. CRM applications and SaaS ensure that your employees can effectively manage their workload and that everybody is working from the same page.

Comments [1]

Comment by Martin Willitts

Wednesday 8th April 2009

The key is probably in how to make the leap. It is perhaps no longer daunting to use these new approaches but still hard to get from where things stand today to making use of them. Rather than using SaaS or mobile devices it is probably simpler to use mobile broadband and a laptop with VPN access into the existing infrastructure. This reduces the complexity of making the change without disrupting the existing systems. Further it allows for SaaS to be taken up for cost saving purposes separately if that is appropriate. Martin.Willitts @ bcs.org.uk

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