Businesses today are increasingly realizing the value of the flexibility that an enterprise mobility solution can offer. How amazing and convenient it is to be able to run your business through your mobile device on the move!
Imagine how you can trigger advanced business transactions directly in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations from your mobile device with no other intermediating steps. Now, what if you can also easily build a mobility solution or customize it just with configurations?
At To-Increase, we’ve helped customers meet such requirements through Anywhere Mobility Studio, a framework designed and fully integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. We’ve been helping them build mobile applications, exposing and triggering business processes from Microsoft’s desktop ERP.
As with most of the things, you will come across challenges in your business and processes when you are trying to introduce mobility. However, there are certain solutions in the market that can help you efficiently deal with them all. For instance, when building or customizing an enterprise mobility solution using our Anywhere Mobility Studio, you would want to get the flexibility and control over the mobile applications you’re creating. And, you can get the best experience when using the To-Increase product(s) simply by focusing on some crucial factors.
In this blog, I will share the challenges you face when implementing an enterprise mobility solution and how a solution like Anywhere Mobility Studio can make it easier for you.
1. Performance issues
As Anywhere Mobility Studio is a framework that triggers the Finance and Operations business functionality, it also covers all the functional or performance issues.
That’s why every time we try to measure the performance of the mobility solutions, we first have to analyze the level of performance delivered by standard Microsoft ERP. This gives us an indication of where to look and what to fix.
The right way forward is to find all kinds of workarounds to make mobility solutions faster. When we are building a business mobility solution, we want to minimalize the interactions between users and the application. This means we want to trigger lots of functionality from Finance and Operations in just one click. It is possible to do that, but the downside of it is that you might have performance issues.
Of course, we can also avoid triggering the Finance and Operations functionality right away and execute it later in a batch process. This allows the AX users to fix eventual issues that came from the processing.
2. Poor offline capabilities
Having offline capabilities on a mobility solution means that the mobile user can use the application and the business processes without having an internet connection. He can even proceed with his activities without having any interruptions. Once back online, processes start syncing to bring the ERP up to date, and an AX user can fix any conflicts that may arise.
Offline functionality is beneficial for businesses that come from remote areas or parts of the world with a weak internet connection. Even poor network configurations and hardware can bring issues, conflicts, or delays to the business.
Though offline features for your enterprise mobility solutions can bring value to your business, there are some disadvantages to it because you don’t have real-time processing with the ERP. There is a delay between the mobile user activity and the real transactions done in the ERP.
Anywhere Mobility Studio doesn’t support offline capabilities. However, we do build it on customer request.
3. Lack of an essential feature
We can see that Finance and Operations don’t always fulfill all the business needs and the functionalities required for your business. Of course, you should have access to them.
Because Anywhere Mobility Studio is a framework fully built and integrated into Dynamics 365 F&O, it gives you the flexibility to extend and customize the standard functionality or to create an entirely new business logic that can be used together with the mobility solution. You are in control of what is happening and when it is happening on your mobile application.
Building new solutions or having customizations on the standard functionality is easily attainable together with Anywhere Mobility Studio because you just need functional and technical knowledge of Dynamics 365 F&O.
4. Inadequate technical skill
When building the mobility solution technically with Anywhere Mobility Studio, the developers should split the functionality into small pieces of LEGO blocks. This makes it easy to reuse the feature, have flexibility in making the configurations, and have a mobility solution that completely fulfills your business needs.
The big challenge is that if it is not executed well technically, the application loses flexibility and doesn’t allow the full configuration experience for the functional designer. A developer’s job is to provide flexibility to the application in such a way that the functional persona can make functional changes on the mobile application just through simple configurations, without any technical exercise.
The good news is that To-Increase provides training sessions, guidance, and support throughout the process of building or customizing a mobile application.
How does the Anywhere Mobility Studio help?
Anywhere Mobility Studio is a solution that helps you—especially your technical and functional F&O specialists—implement mobility in your business. Here are some of the ways in which it can help you:
- Offers flexibility and control over your mobile application and interactive tool to help the designers visualize the “look and feel” of a real application during design.
- Provides a variety of mobile controls that support your application, like map control, camera control, signature control, and chart control.
Ensures fast deployment and full support from To-Increase’s Anywhere team so that your business can go mobile successfully.
Eric Van Hofwegen
