OMS Solutions for Handheld and Mobile Device Manufacturers
Handheld and Mobile Device Manufacturers include companies whose products are primarily deployed in a B2B (business-to-business model) and where the mobile nature of equipment has specific challenges.
Primary Challenges
- Connectivity
Handheld and Mobile devices may or may not have direct internet connectivity.
- Group Administration
In most cases, the end user is not allowed or is discouraged from self-maintaining either the device or any accompanying software. For both the vendor and the customer, asset management and update administration are critical.
- IP Protection
Intellectual property using does not apply to the actual device code but rather analytical or collobartive tools associated with the devices. Here the primary concern may be about feature enablement or number of seats. License enforcement technology is primarily the control mechanism. Additionally, maintenance and subscription services play an important role so that customers are encouraged to continue payments and receive updates.
- Smaller Customer Base
Most of the devices in this class are specialized and therefore do not have broad market appeal. That being said, the user is often a number of levels away from the procurement person and more than ever it is critical to identify and market to the end user.
- Export Compliance and Restriction Enforcement
A critical element related to the electronic delivery of materials is to ensure full audit and tracking capabilities and the ability to dynamically and continually enforce compliance or restrictions related to the materials in the global marketplace.
- Reporting/Archiving
Provide global reporting, performance monitoring and statistics for customer service and compliance purposes.
Solutions
OMS offers three solution levels to the Handheld and Mobile Device Manufacturers industry. The first level, DPM offers a framework and workflow management process to collect and manage finished goods production. The second level, ESD provides technology and a framework to electronically distribute the EDA materials to your customers, it adds the ability for your customer to self-service for both IPD and updates. The third level provides the technology, framework and services to better support and market to your customers while providing the self-service portal.
Release Management
This solution is focused on streamlining the release management process via a collaborative, revision controlled workflow managed central repository. It allows various teams to interact while producing the finished goods. It provides a central repository for all the finished goods deliverables from release notes, to documents to software files. It allows a product structure, content and metadata to be bound together and eventually locked once a product is released.
This solution can reduce pipeline trubulence and surprise as finished goods progress through the states of draft, review, test and release, actual dates can be compared to original estimates. When a target is missed those interested parties can be notified.
Keeping all the structure, content and metadata is a single repository allows shared materials to be easily included in other products. A product can not be released until all of its components are ready to be released. Safeguards can be put into place to ensure individual products can be controlled by different groups but the same process is used by all groups.
Electronic Software Distribution (ESD)
With this solution the ConnectNow is leveraged to provide not only download but also optionally installation (ISM) and update (USM) services. This solution also provides a framework to allow you to create and operate a self-service portal, where customers can view all their entitlements (base products, updates, documentation and licenses). The entitlement center can be customized to allow the customer to view orders and his licenses and/or subscriptions and be integrated with your eCommerce site to allow renewal of subscriptions/licenses to be reflected immediately upon approval.
ESD allows you to proactively notify users of their updates and select the deliverables they want or need. It provides a workflow environment which allows engineers to build the finished goods and for all deliverables to be revision-controlled and approved increasing quality controls and streamlining the release process. It allows gaming companies to reduce the burst updating requirements by separating the game server and download servers onto different independent platforms. You can segment new feature use to selected groups of users.
When combined with our DVECS compliance and restriction services, just-in-time security checks can be enforced at download time, whether it is initial, paused or scheduled activity. This can limit your exposure to fraud and piracy by creating and maintaining blacklists.
Customer Relationship Management
Our CRM solution allows you to add more services and technology to analyze and act on consumer information for marketing and customer support functions. Create a marketing campaign or create a custom list of those customers running a certain hardware device or operating system level; even target customers who have your product A installed but not your product B.
ESD when combined with advanced ConnectNow functionality like Installation Services Manager and Update Service Manager to target and display customer activity, visible to both the customer and your support teams.
Get to know and understand your customers and markets one customer at a time or through segmentation. Review and find your opportunities and threats with data that can be openly shared through integration points with your existing business infrastructure.
|
