Ensemble’s Field Tech App Enables Two-Way Communication
The Experience Manager Mobile team recently challenged some of our technology partners to create proof-of-concept (POC) apps that highlight the capabilities of Experience Manager Mobile, how it integrates with Experience Manager and other Adobe Marketing Cloud services and prove that with the right tools, technologies and systems, that apps can be developed quickly and serve as valuable business tools. Be sure to check out the POCs that Perficient Digital and Axis41 built, too.
We spoke with Remy Kozak, VP of Sales at Ensemble Systems, a solutions provider specializing in mobile apps, connected devices, web and backend systems about their field enablement POC app, how they integrated it into a typical Experience Manager workflow and how they brought in essential mobile marketing services from Adobe Marketing Cloud, such as mobile analytics, notifications, geo-location, and more.
Adobe: Tell us about your field enablement POC app and what problem you are trying to solve.
Kozak: When looking across all of the industries that we serve, from telecom to insurance, we found a common theme in the need for better communication between central dispatchers and their field staff. There is a huge opportunity to enable sales forces, field forces, and field staff with the information that’s hidden in the backend systems of a company. We built our field enablement app to improve the data flow between the field, the central dispatchers, and the company’s digital asset management (DAM) or back-end systems. The app we built allows for real-time push updates to the field staff, access to offline assets such as manuals, and improved reporting back to the central dispatcher and DAM.
Adobe: Why deliver this experience in a mobile app rather than a mobile-friendly website?
Kozak: With a mobile app, we have access to all of the capabilities of the mobile device. Things like location, camera, and time stamping can be automatically tagged so that everything the field staff does can be pushed back into the DAM. This allows for two-way communication that is augmented by messages, voice communications, and all of the data that is pulled off a phone or tablet. This data can then be pushed back into your central database to be analyzed and used to improve future operations.
Adobe: Which AEM capabilities did you leverage when creating this app?http://blogs.adobe.com/aemmobile/files/2016/08/adobe-infobit_grey-1.png
Kozak: We built our app leveraging many Adobe technologies, including Experience Manager Sites, Assets, and Mobile. The tight integration within Experience Manager has actually become a solution accelerator. By using Experience Manager, many of the components we have already built for other projects can be reused. By building our framework on top of the Adobe platform, we can now get to solutions faster than ever before. By leveraging our existing assets, we were able to build out our framework in about three weeks.
Adobe: How can you use the built-in analytics to gain insights and optimize an app?http://blogs.adobe.com/aemmobile/files/2016/08/adobe-infobit_black-4.png
Kozak: All the user activity in our field technician POC is tracked and thereports are very easy to access and analyze. By tracking the usage of the app we can optimize business processes, worker productivity, or even the app itself. It’s a full cycle of creativity. You create, publish, analyze, and then improve. Whether you’re building a field staff technician app or a sales briefcase, you want to know what your employees are using, how they’re using it, and when they’re using it, because if it’s not being used, it’s useless.
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