Mobile tech and today industry

Usually is Industry and warfare the leading flags in technology advances, gadgets and commercial application just follow after some time ,and become available to the normal people. From planes, to cars , GPS, just to name a few, even my first laptop around year 1993 was a refurbished gulf war computer. Laptops already exists but Gulf war become them lighter, thinner and faster.

However, smartphones industry seems to be changing this paradigm for the first time, Yo can see a lot of advances are made in the name of user experience like curve displays, VR, flexible screens or high capacity batteries. Actually, the smartphones penetration is very high in common population, and is expected that in 3 years to have a penetration of the 40% in the population.

But what happens in industry?

We, end users, still use the phone to call as 10 years ago, but also to navigate through internet, check news, transit, google maps (not geolocalization, just google maps), take photos, mostly selfies, hear music, play games of course, and a lot of new verbs, like tweet, WhatsApp a photo. The use of the smartphone increase exponentialy.

Industry just watch from outside trying to figure out what to do with all that tech. Is as they still do not understand what a smartphone, or a tablet can do. In fact most of the industry use mobile to reach the customers, but not to improve they own operations, the question is why, what happened inside industry that make them so jealous to include this tech. Is no lack of knowledge since mobile developers has become something common; also there is no a monetary problem also as smartphones are cheap. There are also several industrial phones, that can work fine in extreme conditions.

So, in case we are still wondering the causes, let us summarize what a mobile technology can do and let’s play with some ideas. Any 100 U$ Phone, at least has Wi-Fi that allows to be connected, GPS geolocation, that let you maximize productivity with the vehicles logistics, or to attach a position to any event, a camera that read anything, NFC to identify everything, a decent fast operating system like Android, Bluetooth to connect to other devices. Actually, augmented reality gives even more power to glasses as well tablets and virtual reality can used to create virtual environments.

In my own experience mobile has grown into adulthood, in fact recently when a company ask for advice with an obsolescence problem with some old terminals, the smartphone solution was well accepted and become a success. In the other hands in another an oil and gas top 500 company with operations in more than 80 countries, they use mobile for customer service, while continue maintaining old QNX computers from late 90s behind the doors.

Security with beacons around the perimeter, geolocated stock material, fleet control inside and outside, augmented reality for maintenance and operation, push advises for alarms and communication, photo documented and localized security detours for health and safety , NFS for tagging and stock control, virtual reality for training, games for engaging employees, the scope is humongous.

There is no excuses, future is in mobility and Industry should give it a chance in order to improve operations, get close to the factory and have live control on operations.