Preface

Doing more with less. That’s the goal of managers faced with increasingly tight budgets across a wide spectrum of industries. Instead of making new investments in enterprise applications, managers across the board are looking for new ways to leverage existing investments, and the spotlight is on SAP.

In the last few years, many companies have spent heavily on SAP applications that integrated their business processes, and they have benefited from tangible improvements in cost and efficiency.

Those same companies now sense another opportunity in mobilizing SAP applications. The goal is to reduce the cost of service, optimize the uptime of their assets, augment operational efficiencies, and enhance customer satisfaction through field operations

New Opportunities, New Tools, New Understanding
Mobile is becoming central to the way we do business. In the span of a few years, mobile process innovations such as mobile field service and mobile asset management have leaped from being a nice-to-have to a need-to-have enterprise capability. In the food and beverage industry, for example, mobile solutions are considered mission-critical in direct store delivery.

Despite the growing importance of mobilizing the enterprise, most managers still don’t understand this complex area. Nor is it easy for them to attain this knowledge. Unlike specialists in the area, managers don’t pay attention to the constantly changing technology details necessary to implement a mobile solution. What they are keenly interested in is a business process perspective that shows them how mobile initiatives can contribute to their overall business success. At present, that need goes noticeably unmet.

In particular, the need for a better understanding of SAP NetWeaver Mobile, SAP Mobile Infrastructure, and SAP Solutions for Mobile Business is immediate and widespread.

The Focus of This Book
Best-practice firms realize that the real yardstick for measuring technology value is productivity improvement. Keeping this in mind, this book focuses on a variety of business processes that companies are mobilizing, from sales to service. Our objective is to illustrate the different ways organizations are deploying mobile solutions.

In baseball terms, mobile processes are in the first inning. Like the many technologies before it, people have tended to overestimate the speed of implementation of mobile processes and underestimate their impact. We have only glimpsed the changes that an innovation like the mobile Internet will cause. Add to that the potential of RFID and of powerful handheld computers and smart phones, and there will be profound changes in the way business processes operate.

However, as compelling as its advantages are, true enterprise mobility is highly complex, so another focus of this book is the mobile infrastructure that anchors applications, or what it takes to make mobility work in the real world.

We illustrate the importance of interoperability and integration across systems and applications. Mobile devices must work consistently and reliably. Wireless connections must function persistently and securely, while integrating seamlessly with other enterprise networks and information systems. Monitoring and management capabilities must provide visibility and efficient, centralized control of up to thousands of devices across networks and locations.

What Makes This Book Unique?
Despite the changing market dynamics, most books on mobile business offer either simplistic, high-level overviews in which a single solution is made to fit every problem or the kind of detailed technology analysis and software development techniques that only an experienced developer could understand. We have aimed for the middle ground between those two extremes.

Our goal is to fulfill the need for targeted customer education, mobile business case creation, and a solution blueprint. In particular, this book will provide a balanced, practical overview of mobile process innovation for IT managers, line of business managers, and consultants. We hope to equip readers to make intelligent business decisions related to extracting more ROI from their ERP, CRM, SCM, and PLM investments without dragging them into a morass of detail.

Mobilizing SAP opens with a general mobile applications framework that we have developed based on numerous consulting engagements. It then systematically builds on the various elements of the framework. For instance, in the context of a mobile field service solution, it would lead customers through the following questions or situations:

• I want to implement a mobile field service application. What roadmap should I follow?
• Who are the best-practice companies in mobile field service? What are they doing that is unique?
• If I have a limited amount of money for investment, how should the mobile business case be structured to create the most business value?
• With which of my SAP back-office applications should I integrate my field service solution?

Mobilizing SAP demystifies for managers the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver Mobile and SAP Solutions for Mobile Business. This book is a self-help guide devoted to helping readers understand the basics of how to design and execute a mobile solution. Our secondary goal is to provide a hype-free, practical guide to IT managers, corporate decision makers, technical developers, and others involved with deciding how to use mobile data to improve business performance.

Target Audience
The target audience for Mobilizing SAP is mostly managers who are looking for ideas on how to create effective mobile solutions that leverage their current investments in SAP. These managers know that they are not interested in the details of the “cool” technology; they want to understand the mobile business value and ROI.

In particular, business and IT executives, project managers, consultants, and students who are involved with implementing mobile data solutions can all learn from Mobilizing SAP. Although we hope it will be of interest to those individuals directly engaged in creating mobile strategy or vendors creating mobile technology, it targets a much broader global audience.

We expect this book to become the playbook for mobilizing business processes. We look forward to hearing from our readers regarding their experiences and insights.

Ravi Kalakota

Paul Kurchina