4G Wireless and Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation has been one of the buzz-words of 2016 in business:

While the term might have peaked (looking at the graph) there is no doubt that every process of the business has gone through or is going through a a process of digitization, which often changes the fundamentals of the business process itself, whether it's customer interaction, logistics, finance & payments, production etc.

Within the IT domain, Cloud applications have been the enabling and driving force between many of the transformation processes as they allow applications to be accessed from anywhere and anyone, instead of the traditional confines of employees connected to the corporate WAN network.

Cloud applications in itself are more efficient, more cost effective and provide higher uptime and -security compared (at comparable cost) with traditional in-house client-server applications. While these benefits are considered IT benefits, the bigger business benefit is the 'liberation' of applications now that anyone, anywhere in the organization can use and develop them, creating new business models, new customer interaction, new opportunities for the business to evolve. And a growing percentage of spend on Cloud applications is from the Lines of Business itself (e.g the marketing department ordering 'MailChimp'), rather then the IT departments.

When talking to IT WAN and Network professionals, the same analogy can be seen when it comes to WAN Network Access. For the longest time, connecting offices and branches to the WAN has been a painful, cumbersome and expensive process. Dealing with individual telcos or an expensive integrator to make sure that all the pieces work together, delays of weeks or months to get connections in, long multi-year contracts.

4G Wireless Access is bringing immediate relief and benefits by introducing a level of flexibility and reliability not seen before on traditional wired services. Next-day delivery, high SLAs and month-on-month contracts are standard for us as Blue Wireless and more are to follow. These are benefits and savings which IT departments anywhere can harvest.

However, the business benefit of 'liberating' access and making it simple and easy for anyone in the organization to order and use it, is transforming business and creating enormous potential for revenue increase and cost savings. The flexibility to have reliable access at anytime anywhere without long and expensive IT processes, creates new ways to build business and serve customers and significantly increase productivity and cost-efficiency.

Here are three examples to illustrate how our customers have use 4G Wireless to transform a business process:

Customer Acquisition: Wireless Access enables customer service teams to serve customers where they are: Grab Taxi is signing up new drivers at large parking lot events, Health Promotion Board is registering new users at shopping malls. Rather then having customers to 'report' at a central office, reps have secure and reliable access to their cloud applications from where the customers are. All enabled with 4G Wireless Access.

Remote Management: Windmill parks are usually far away from metro areas for obvious reasons. However, they do require ongoing monitoring and management to ensure safe and efficient operation. With 4G Wireless Access, sites can now be remotely monitored, reducing the need for expensive physical inspections or shutting down operations.

Site Office Automation: Health and Safety registrations and reporting are an essential, but often cumbersome part of construction site operations. As this process is being digitized, workers can now log their reports immediately on-line. However, how to do this at a construction site without any network access? By installing 4G-based WIFI stations at the site, Blue Wireless has enabled secure and reliable access, allow staff to complete the process right there and then without having to return back to head office for filing, saving time and money.

While we do see implementations where 4G wireless is one-on-one replacing a fixed line as wireless offers better price/performance, more often than not, 4G Wireless enables a whole new business process that was previously impossible, resulting in significant overall benefits or savings for the business is a whole.

'Network Access' is often unfortunately still an afterthought in many IT projects, but with the flexibility and cost-levels of 4G Wireless Access services, this missing link can can now be provided easily.

Talk to us to see if we can help with your transformation to Wireless. www.bluewireless.asia