Unlocking business mobility

If you ask a sales representative, it’s the ability to access important information during a customer visit. For workers on a virtual team, it’s the ability to be in a seminar but still receive and respond to an urgent request to review a document by the end of the day.

Mobility gives us the freedom to collaborate and transact business outside traditional workplaces and times. It is communication on the go, with access to the right information at the right time. The ability to work on our terms makes us more productive and it also gives us the flexibility to balance our work and personal lives.

Business often presents situations when decisive action is required and success is based on the information available to an employee. These are instances that can make or break a major deal – decisive moments companies can’t afford to lose.

When a business is empowered through mobile technology, conversations and information flow more freely. As a result, employees and teams are more in the know and more responsive. They can take the necessary action, inform the people who need to know and interact directly with the back-end systems to see what the rest of the team is seeing. By being more agile, productive and cost-efficient, this newfound power helps their company create a competitive edge and leverage their people and information more opportunistically.

As mobilisation becomes more mainstream, the impact on organisations and the work life of employees continues to evolve. Many organisations focus initial mobilisation efforts on those workers who stand to gain the greatest benefits, both in terms of work processes and life balance. One such organisation who were presented with the challenge of providing workers with mobile e-mail, calendar contact and product information was Sampo Group.

Sampo Group provides insurance and financial services in the Nordic and Baltic regions. It is Finland’s largest financial services group, tracing its history back 130 years. The company took its current form in 2004, when Sampo plc acquired Nordic insurer If P&C as a subsidiary. Sampo is the leading property and casualty insurer in the Nordic countries and the second largest bank in Finland. Its services include retail banking, investment counselling, life and property insurance.

Many of the company’s 11,000 plus employees spend most of their time on the road, visiting customers and calling on potential new accounts. Until recently, Sampo’s staff relied on laptops when they needed information or access to e-mail from a customer site. However, because many companies don’t allow outside computers to connect to their networks, Sampo staff often couldn’t retrieve the information until after the customer meeting. Laptops were also awkward to use during meeting breaks or in airports that are ideal times to check e-mail.

The solution

Sampo implemented a mobile information system that enables its sales and management staff to access internal information from the field using Nokia 9300 smartphones and Nokia 9500 Communicators. Now, Sampo sales staff can respond to questions from customers with real-time product and pricing information without plugging into a network. Travelling managers can check and reply to e-mail from airport terminals and train stations and during meeting breaks.

“Staff in our enterprise sales division, who meet with customers, benefit greatly from real-time access to resources such as customer information and credit verification,” said Hannu Salminen, Sampo Group’s Chief Technical Officer. “Management, IT and sales managers were in the pilot group that evaluated the Nokia devices. Our intent is to offer the Nokia device to all employees who need access to e-mail, calendar and data on the move. We expect the total number of users to reach about 1000.”

The benefits

Sampo staff had been asking for mobile e-mail and personal information management (PIM) for several months. The company decided that the Nokia 9300 and the Nokia 9500 provided the best combination of voice and text communication in a single device. A single device saved Sampo the expense and inconvenience of equipping its staff with two different devices for voice and text. Travelling staff make better use of ‘dead’ time on the road by managing their messages remotely.

How it works

The Nokia 9300 and Nokia 9300 feature large screens and full keyboards that make managing email and contact information remotely much easier than a conventional cell phone or a laptop. Users connect to Sampo servers over GPRS networks trhough Symantic firewalls and virus protection and authenticate using their SecurID cards.

IBM WebSphere Everyplace Access mobile middleware provides the connectivity and management layer between Sampo’s network and the Nokia handsets. Data stored locally is protected by using the Pointsec data encryption application.

Mobilising your organisation

The opportunity for organisations to effectively mobilise their workforces is here. Nokia understands the business mobility market and, with the help of its partners, is able to bring businesses of all sizes a truly integrated mobile business solution.

To find out more about Nokia’s range of mobility solutions, visit www.nokiaforbusiness.com