(July) Proprietary mobile solutions were prohibitively expensive—and then the iPhone arrived. The company created an iOS app called ChainLinq Mobile to track everything from pickup signatures to GPS-based time stamps and piloted the app with 30 drivers in 2008. Today, D.W. Morgan uses an enterprise application management platform to control and distribute ChainLinq Mobile to its delivery workers around the world.
While D.W. Morgan is considerably smaller than the Fortune 500 companies it services, it seeks to control costs at every turn, which is why technology solutions based on consumer-class hardware are so appealing. However, taking advantage of cheaper hardware doesn’t lessen the cost of implementing control measures in an enterprise environment. Companies seeking to harness apps on consumer devices need to contend with deployment, updates, user proile management, authentication, security, and in some cases maintaining an in-house app store. Despite all of this back-end complexity, users will expect the same level of simplicity they experience when dealing with ordinary “public” applications on their devices.
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