Mobile Enterprise Alliance Announces 2005 Mobile Impact™ Awards Winners

Award Winners Announced via Podcast

Wakefield, Mass. – November 15, 2005 - The Mobile Enterprise Alliance (MEA), a global advocacy group promoting the business benefits of workforce mobility to enterprise end users and decision makers, today announced the winners of its Mobile Impact™ Awards program. The prestigious Mobile Impact Awards honor leading enterprises for successful and innovative deployments of mobile enterprise solutions that successfully balance technology investments with business objectives. The winners were announced via a podcast today in conjunction with TechTarget’s SearchMobileComputing.com. The podcast is available at http://searchmobilecomputing.techtarget.com/ and www.mobileenterprise.org/awards.

Nominations were submitted from around the world as case studies in seven categories. The entries were evaluated by an independent group of judges including leading editors and analysts Kara Gattine, associate editor of TechTarget’s SearchNetworking and SearchMobileComputing, Eugene Signorini of Yankee Group, John Stehman of Robert Frances Group, and Robert Alcock of InterComms magazine.

The 2005 Mobile Impact Award winners are:

• Mobile e-mail: Peterson Air Force Base
• Field Service & Support: Fornetti Bakeries Kft.
• Sales Force Enablement: A. van Delft International B.V.
• Mobile Office Solution: San Diego Medical Services Enterprise
• Extended Enterprise Computing And Connectivity: Zipcar, Inc.
• Mobile Security: Continental Airlines, Inc.
• Mobile Management: Regie Autonomie des Transports Parisiens (RATP)
 
“These organizations exemplify the mission of this awards program: successful and innovative deployment of a mobile solution that balances technology investments with business objectives,” stated Daniel Taylor, managing director, MEA.

Mobile Email
Peterson Air Force Base
Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States
www.peterson.af.mil 

Summary: The IT support team at Peterson Air Force Base is tasked with providing help desk services to approximately 6,000 workers. The geographically distributed nature of the base and the prior help desk infrastructure required IT staff to return to a central office to mark trouble tickets as closed before moving on to the next ticket. The strict service metrics for this environment meant that problems appeared to take longer to resolve, poorly reflecting the level of service that IT staff provided. By deploying Aeroprise's mobile help desk application, IT staff at Peterson Air Force Base was able to run existing BMC Remedy help desk applications on mobile handheld devices. The combination of mobile e-mail and help desk was a winning combination that significantly improved trouble ticket resolution and is expected to form the basis for of other mobile IT support applications as well as for other groups of mobile workers on the base.

Vendors: Aeroprise, Cingular Wireless, Research In Motion

Field Service & Support
Fornetti Bakeries Kft.
Kecskemet, Hungary
www.fornetti.com

Summary: Fornetti, a large international frozen baked products company, manages franchise operations across 8 countries within Europe. In these areas, Fornetti maintains a fleet of 90 representatives who provide field service, on-site CRM and special marketing/sales activities. During a business process re-engineering project, senior management realized that they needed to improve management controls of the field force workers in the various countries in which the company operates. Fornetti management focused on the high cost of field force activities as well as consistent and unexplained loss of spare parts and equipment.

Together with Fornetti's management and IT division, Mobile & RFID Data Systems re-engineered the business processes of the company and transformed them into a `best business practices' wireless field force operation, using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and the Aware/Mobile platform. The RFID tags were embedded into equipment, vehicles and customer sites, and these tags are linked to a set of processes in the Aware/Mobile platform to allow management to track inventory, assets and workers, ensuring timely and accurate service delivery to customers and franchisees. The resulting operations were more efficient and customer satisfaction was increased, leading to greater revenues and lower costs to Fornetti. The project ROI was delivered within 8 months.

Vendors: Mobile and RFID Data Systems, Inside Technologies, palmOne (Handspring), Hewlett-Packard iPAQ

Honorable Mention: Cox Communications - Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Sales Force Enablement
A. van Delft International B.V.
Rijnsburg, Netherlands
www.avdint.com

Summary: At the beginning of each workday, drivers synchronize their devices and receive the data for their route. With the handheld they can immediately print an invoice for the customer at the time of delivery, and can digitally accept new orders on site.  When they commence data synchronization, the new information is transmitted to the back-office server, and is immediately available to buyers at the auction, who can now react to the new orders. Based on the purchase prices and a number of other factors, at the end of the day the system calculates the current price of each flower for the next day. This system greatly improved customer service for small flower shops that were ordering from the drivers. It also decreased costs by eliminating errors associated with transferring orders from paper. The system has given A. van Delft a competitive edge because the company is able to price their flowers more accurately based on the auctions' daily flower cost, and they can provid
e customers with instant access to order information.

Vendors: iAnywhere Solutions, Omnimove, Symbol Technologies

Honorable Mention: SBB AG – Bern, Switzerland

Mobile Office Solution
San Diego Medical Services Enterprise
San Diego, California, United States
www.sandiego.gov/fireandems/911/emergmed.shtml 

Summary: San Diego Medical Services Enterprise (SDMSE) used to lose $2.5 million in patient bills every year with its antiquated, paper-based system. San Diego Fire Captan Greg George implemented Palm® TungstenT handhelds to capture that data at the scene of every 911 call. Now records are never lost and paramedics and firefighters can work more efficiently.

Vendors: Intellisync Corporation, Satellite Forms, LexSpell

Honorable Mention: McKee Foods – Collegedale, Tennessee, United States

Extended Enterprise Computing & Connectivity
Zipcar, Inc.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
www.zipcar.com

Summary: Zipcar is a “car sharing service” based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that offers car sharing services in 21 North American cities. The way the service works, members reserve a specific vehicle in their neighborhood either online or by telephone. The reservation information is shared with a specialty “black box” devices installed in all Zipcar vehicles. Members go to the location of the car they've reserved and hold their “Zipcard” RFID tag in front of a special window decal. Their membership and reservation time is read and validated, and only then does the system unlock the car door and enable the ignition. Members use the car, returning it to the same location, ready for the next reservation. Usage information is sent to Zipcar's servers and the member's account is automatically charged.

Vendors: Cingular Wireless

Honorable Mention: Best Buy Canada

Mobile Security
Continental Airlines, Inc.
Houston, Texas, United States
www.continental.com

Summary: As Continental's needs proliferated from dial to broadband to wireless and security risks continued to grow, so did the complexities of managing its mobile workforce. Many mobile workers had multiple icons on their notebook computers – as many as three or four – designed to handle different remote access and security scenarios. Continental wanted a “one-click” solution that could combine comprehensive access with end-to-end security into a single, unified package.

Vendors: Fiberlink Communications

Mobile Management
Regie Autonomie des Transports Parisiens (RATP)
Paris, France
www.ratp.fr

Summary: La Defense is the second largest transportation hub in France and among the ten largest in Europe. More than 480,000 passengers travel daily through the La Defense hub, the connection point for six types of transportation systems: RER, subway, bus, tram, taxi and the SNCF suburban train. For the RATP employees, “carrying around kilos of paper-based timetables and information” is no longer an option. Instead, they need to instantly access up-to date information in order to accurately answer questions from time-constrained passengers such as: “When the next bus is leaving?” or “Where is the nearest exit to the Les Miroirs tower?”. Since 2004, over two hundred RATP employees have been equipped with Wi-Fi-enabled PDAs. Using the Cisco-based Wi-Fi network and the Appear IQ wireless communication platform, the employee is automatically recognized upon entering a hotspot and receives direct access to personalized information related to his job function, location and time of
 the day: context-aware services.

Vendors: Appear Networks, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu Siemens

Honorable Mention: Procter & Gamble

The winning case studies are posted on the MEA website at www.mobileenterprise.org/awards.

About the Mobile Enterprise Alliance (MEA)

The Mobile Enterprise Alliance (MEA) is a global advocacy group promoting the business benefits of workforce mobility to enterprise IT managers and decision makers. The MEA provides a vendor-neutral and technology-independent clearinghouse for information about the mobile enterprise including news, case studies, research, business analysis tools, and more. This information is available - free of charge - to enterprise managers, solutions providers and industry professionals. This helps enterprise decision makers to make informed decisions about the technical architectures within the context of enterprise business objectives. As a not-for-profit organization, the MEA is funded through dues from participating vendors, service providers and systems integrators. The MEA currently represents more than 1,200 IT members in 32 countries worldwide. More information can be obtained at  www.mobileenterprise.org.