Enabling Mobile access to Enterprise Applications

Introduction 
          In today's world, the mobile phone is the most widely-used electronic device on the planet. Mobile has become a prominent mode of effective communication for organizations. More and more enterprise applications are thus mobile enabled to improve the execution of day-to-day business activities.
          The growth of mobility-enabled applications is driven essentially by the same factors that are driving IT and business process change, namely the need to be more responsive, optimize the efficiency of staff resources, and shorten the cycle time of key processes throughout their value chain. Although mobile applications have been for the most part about pushing information out into the field, less customer-centric applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) will more likely promote process optimization in areas such as production planning, inventory management, and logistics by bringing in and incorporating information from the field faster.
           Although the use of mobile technology has clearly begun to take hold for industry specific applications, enterprises that seek to capitalize on it must overcome a series of challenges.

Challenges 
       The following are some of the challenges in mobile enabling enterprise applications:

• Incompatibility between mobile phone platforms and the target application’s platform 
• Look and feel needs to be consistent across channels for ease of use
• Data security risks

       The drivers and patterns of mobile application adoption vary across industries, but organizations have started to apply mobile technology to those processes where the integration of real-time information can drastically improve process quality. The seamless integration of enterprise applications with mobile devices is described below.

Solution 
         Mobile application development is the process by which applications are developed for hand held devices such as PDAs or mobile phones. These applications are installed in the user’s hand held device. These applications can communicate to enterprise application and serve necessary information to the users.      
          Enterprise applications can be mobile enabled by creating a web service that would communicate to enterprise database and serve data to mobile device. Data transfer between the application system and mobile devices can be achieved by either using Push or Pull technology.


Benefits 
          The mobile enabling of enterprise applications has the ability to transform the fundamental business processes relying on them. The agents of this transformation include alert-based automation, improved data transparency throughout the process cycle, and improved efficiency.

Some of the other benefits are given below:

• Provide users with access to real time data views and reports
• Minimize user training by retaining the look and feel of the original application
• Manage mobile assets effectively and reduce overhead expenses
• Offer opportunities to provide greater flexibility to an organization’s workforce
• Improve employee response time
• More accurate billing and reduced paperwork