Mobile Business Processes:

In today's globalizing economy in which cost-efficiency and customer satisfaction play vital roles for the competitiveness of companies, one focus of Business Process Engineering efforts should be on the mobile work force. Nowadays most enterprises have at least some employees who spend a large amount of their time outside the office. Whether it is consultancy, sales, construction or service - such employees are potential users of mobile technologies. For instance, a salesperson might find a system useful through which he/she can generate a customer order on site using a mobile device, and then directly send the order in digital form to the office for further processing. Or, for a service person it could be helpful if he/she could query the availability of spare parts and create an order right away without error-prone voice communication or need of pen and paper. Mobile business processes in many cases eliminate the need of multiple entries of data, make processes faster, and reduce the work force needed for data processing. By enabling these applications, mobile technologies provide the basis for a true integration of mobile workers into the business processes.

----------------------------------------
Dr. Key Pousttchi
Email: key.pousttchi@wiwi.uni-augsburg.de
University of Augsburg
Chair of Business Informatics and Systems Engineering
Head of Mobile Commerce Working Group