In today’s tech-savvy world, organizations will find it hard to survive without a mobile strategy. The staggering rise in the number of mobile users worldwide indicates increased business and customer opportunities. Consequently, an enterprise mobility solution can decide the future of your business.
A mobility solution can help reduce costs and increase the productivity of your organization. However, building one can be a complex, time-consuming process that can require heavy customization to cater to different industries or company needs.
Do any of the following questions apply to you?
Do any of the following questions apply to you?
Are you a Microsoft Dynamics Finance and Operations user looking to create a mobile application that directly triggers your ERP’s business logic?
Do you want to have a simple, easy, and fast process to build mobile solutions?
Do you have technical and functional knowledge just about Microsoft Dynamics AX 365 and no other technologies?
Do you want to do changes to your app just using functional knowledge without involving developers and have lots of flexibility?
At To-Increase, most of the customers approaching us for enterprise mobility solutions had similar questions and found what they were looking for in our Anywhere Mobility Studio.
Our Anywhere Mobility Studio offering is a framework, fully integrated into Microsoft Dynamics Finance and Operations, to help customers build their own mobile solutions.
This means that you don’t need to hire highly-skilled, expensive staff that know other technologies to build your own mobile application—anyone with Microsoft Dynamics AX technical and functional knowledge would be enough.
In this blog, I will explain how Anywhere Mobility Studio can help you build the most suitable solution for your business.
How can Anywhere Mobility Studio help?
Our framework, tool, and support together empower you to use your imagination and create mobile applications in a fast, easy, and flexible manner as per your business requirements. You can, thus, offer a unique and personalized mobile user experience.
All the mobile app operations are executed directly in Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP, giving you a real-time overview of your business in your ERP. As a result, you do not have to worry about synchronization, data migration, or solving conflicts between your mobile app and your ERP.
Our framework can help you build the right solution that fits precisely to your business needs. You could be looking to build a timesheet application to allow your employees to register time spent on their projects. Or, or you may want a warehouse management application to help your warehouse workers have an overview of your goods and movements that take place there.
Irrespective of whether you need a solution to improve your finance or operation, you can easily build it yourself with Anywhere Mobility Studio.
Top 5 features of Our Mobility solution (Anywhere Mobility Studio)
Here are the top 5 features of our Anywhere Mobility Studio that can assist you through your mobility solution creation process:
1. No complex coding
You just need an MS Dynamics 365 F&O specialist and a developer to build your mobile business application. The specialist understands your business and can create the right design for your app while the developer can do some small coding to trigger the business logic.
If the business logic is built into Microsoft Dynamics 365, then the developer can simply reuse it. They don’t have to duplicate the logic—just need to trigger what is already there and expose it to the mobile solution to be used by the end-user. All the business logic of Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be triggered by the mobile device.
2. Design control
Everything is configurable. Once the developer technically transfers the business logic to the framework and does the configuration, the designer is in full control of the application.
He can control the flow of the business processes, the look, and feel of the application. For instance, he can decide the position of a button, label, text box, or even the behavior of each button with respect to the colors or shapes of different types of controls.
3. Ensure flexibility
One of the best practices when developing an application with our Anywhere Mobility Studio is to build small LEGO blocks with code that triggers the business logic. Once this is done and transferred to the Dynamics 365 AX designer, then everything can be configured very fast and easy. You can also impart a high level of flexibility of where and how to use the business logic.
Some examples of small actions that trigger business logic are:
1. Create a sales order header with specific parameters like customer details
2. Create a sales order line with specific parameters like item or quantity
3. Have a sales order ID as a parameter post a sales order.
With this small imagination exercise, you can already see that these three small actions can be executed in many business scenarios and processes. This means that building your actions is a one-time effort and can be applied in all your business scenarios, eventually.
4. What you see is what you get
Anywhere Mobility Studio is a tool that addresses two types of job roles:
1. a functional designer, the one that knows the business logic
2. a developer, the technical person that can do the coding
We want to provide a good user experience for both the types of users. Therefore, with Anywhere Mobility Studio, we make it easy for the technical person to develop and for the functional person to design by building control that will display and assist the users in all the app-building processes.
This control will demonstrate the look and feel of the app directly in Microsoft Dynamics AX so that the people building the app can visualize what they are creating/designing and how the app will look like.
5. Use standard controls
To be able to build a mobile solution, you, of course, need the standard controls like buttons, text boxes, grids, texts so on. However, to fulfill more advanced business requirements Anywhere Mobility Studio offers controls like:
(a) Signature control, which can be used on the mobile app by the user to validate a transaction or a document
(b) Camera control, which is a must-have in all kinds of business scenarios.
Example: When an item is broken in the warehouse, and the warehouse worker needs to inform, document the damage, and attach a picture to it.
(c) Chart control, which is crucial for the business apps, provides insightful information just in one picture.
(d) Map control, which can be useful for localizing your truck or team working on the site.
Why Anywhere Mobility Studio?
Anywhere Mobility Studio includes several features around the framework to provide a smooth and effective experience to all its users—both functional or technical.
The features cover all the crucial factors in the application building— generating documentation from the designs created by the functional consultant, testing your business process tool, or transaction logging based on the mobile user activities.
The most significant advantage is that your business has an experienced partner, To-Increase, that provides support along the process of building your mobile solutions.
Either you can create your own applications or use the solutions built by To-Increase and customize them based on your needs. Our portfolio contains solutions for logistics, retail, and rental that can help your business go mobile, and you can get help with implementation, support, and training.
Eric Van Hofwegen
