Mobility at SAP for Utilities 2013

Reflecting on this year's SAP for Utilities conference, two presentations about mobility solutions stand out in particular. Greg Rimmer of the Water Corporation of Western Australia presented a number of key take-aways from their mobility implementation:

• It's not just another IT project. 
• Solicit input from end users on hardware usability.
• Develop apps that add real, measurable value.
• Apps should run without an connection.
• Data entry screens should be intuitive and context-sensitive.
• Allow collection of all data, then reconcile it after upload.
• Be extensible.
• Enlist field associates for training.
• Again, it's not just another IT project.

The following day, John Northko of Aquarian Water and Florian Ganz of Energy4U spoke about Aquarian's mobile asset solution. One of Florian's comments struck us as particularly noteworthy: get the software right, and users will treat the hardware as their own--that is, carefully. Experience showed that ruggedization is far less important than usability, and that even relatively fragile tablets can tolerate everyday use just fine. In fact, Florian found that iPads were most often returned not due to damage or abuse, but rather from worn batteries and other normal wear-and-tear.

Mobility and SAP for Utilities

As signposted in the first day's keynotes, mobility was a recurring topic during the 2011 SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio. Deloitte's Lee Ditmar and Mark White presented a well rehearsed message (and super slick Keynote deck) about going beyond the "veneer" of mobility to offer new operating models and services—plus including other information workers in addition to field teams alone. Again, this sounds terrific but highly aspirational; we'll be giving further thought to practical, real world examples that utilities would actually consider implementing. In fact, we'll be doing this next week at Sonoma County Water Agency, as part of our Fleet Management project.

Other notable take-aways: Mark's advocacy of single task-oriented mobile apps that deliver obvious results is another valuable best practice. And we also liked their characterization of descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics—a good framework in which to think about data and actionable behavior in the workplace.

Conveniently enough, Adolf Alesch from IBM closed the loop on some of this theory later on in the conference with his presentation on Mobility Moments℠. He gave a great example of a mobile app that would enable a field team to photograph a transformer, for example, and connect the image and related GIS data to the SAP Asset Master in order to get real-time maintenance records. This "augmented reality" scenario combines a utility's system of record with its system of engagement to generate greater efficiency and better customer service.