Blog: How Can I Reduce Mobile Device Disruptions?
Mobile Insights is a series of educational blogs by B2M Solution that explains the fundamentals of mobile device analytics and how the technology can be used to help mobile devices and their users work more efficiently. This installment covers how mobile device analytics can prevent common causes of device failures.
Ever since businesses began using mobile computers to support their operations millions of devices have failed in the field at one time or another. There are a huge number of reasons why devices have failed, but in-depth analysis has revealed one common thread: most mobile device failures are preventable.
Bad network connectivity, poor battery health, software conflicts and physical damage to the device are some of the leading causes of disruption. Using ruggedized models and protective cases can prevent damage from drops and spills, but surprisingly physical damage is not the leading cause of device failure. Connectivity, software and battery issues all cause more disruptions to mobile worker productivity.
The good news is that mobile device analytics can help business to prevent most of those disruptions. Looking beyond the shell, mobile device analytics solutions can identify the root causes behind mobile device disruptions. For example, one root cause could be a software update that causes an application to continually run in the background, overworking the processor leading to a slow user experience and rapid battery decline. Another could be an extension that automatically reboots a device or connectivity issues preventing applications from getting updates or making data transfers. The key to preventing these type of disruptions is to identify them and then understand what causes them so that changes can be made to prevent them from happening again. Ideally businesses will want to be alerted to disruptions as they occur so that immediate action can be taken to prevent the issue affecting more users. Real time alerts are key to device failure prevention.
Here are four steps organizations can take to reduce their device disruptions.
1. Use real-time monitoring:
As issues cannot always be anticipated, continual monitoring your mobile devices and real time alerts can help to provide adequate warning that devices are having problems and may even fail if immediate action is not taken. Mobile device analytics provides ongoing, real-time analysis alerting key personnel when applications start running slowly, batteries start draining quickly, data transfers slow and/or network connections drop, and other performance conditions that indicate the device may crash.
2. Identify leading causes of disruptions:
Mobile device analytics enables you to look at trends quickly and easily – graphs and charts are far more visual than wading through past service tickets and highlight trends with your mobile estate, be it connectivity issues by region or battery degradation across different device types. Analytics will highlight trends so that action can be taken to prevent a future issue that will impact on device performance so you can keep your devices healthy and performing at their best for your workers.
3. Identify the root cause of performance problems:
Mobile device analytics gets right under the shell of your devices looking at the parts you can’t even see, such as software. Many performance problems can be traced back to OS and application software versions, settings and installed extensions that are inconsistent across the device estate or cause conflicts.
4. Change configurations to prevent the conditions that lead to common problems:
Deep visibility into devices can reveal which applications and features will result in resource conflicts that can cause devices to fail. Mobile device analytics can predict how devices will perform based on their historical norms, real-time status and multiple other variables. These predictive analytics provide time to make configuration changes, issue alerts and take other actions to prevent device failures, unplanned downtime and lost productivity.
Take a quick look at our ROI Calculator tool that enables you to calculate the financial improvement that can be realized by reducing disruptions. It’s fully customizable so you can put in your current estimated disruptions for connectivity, battery or other disruptions and the number and type of devices – we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
B2M Solutions was founded in 2002, and our founders and many of our team worked in the enterprise mobile computing industry many years before that. Collectively we’ve helped manage and optimize millions of devices over the years and have learned a lot about what makes mobile systems successful. Our experience – and data from our analytics software – has convinced us that most mobile device disruptions are preventable. Apply the principles presented here to maximise the uptime and performance of your mobile estate.
If you’d like to discuss how B2M can help your business to reduce device disruptions and optimise device performance to the same 99.999% level you’d expect from your data centre contact us today.