Advancing mobile digital transformation

While companies and industries may use diverse concepts of digital transformation, giving people immediate, unrestricted access to the information and software capabilities they need is usually a key consideration. Enterprise mobility is seen as critical in accomplishing this. Recent research by analysts at Forrester documents that 82 percent of the respondents believe that mobility has to be a cornerstone of digital transformation.

Businesses also realize that their people don’t want to experience a discontinuity between work and personal life. For most of us, mobile apps are one of the most desirable and effective aspects of today’s technology. We look for the same enablement in our jobs when we interact with ERP and other systems.

Many companies are still in the early stages of developing the leadership, infrastructures, and business cultures where digital transformation can take hold and lead to desirable outcomes. When it comes to enterprise mobility, they see its potential for accelerating processes and helping people become more effective, but they are also aware of its shortcomings in delivering a productive mobile user experience. Too often, mobile capabilities are too basic and lack functionality to make them fully effective. Other times, they may be too difficult to use.

Another complaint we hear from companies is that their mobile apps cannot properly access real-time business data because the data sources or the apps are not configured to connect. Third-party apps may not integrate well or offer only limited configuration options. Device restrictions may also limit the reach of mobile software tools.

 Enterprise mobility without restrictions

Mobility Studio, the enterprise mobility framework from STAEDEAN, can expose any standard or customized business process in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to mobility. It enables advanced mobility on any device, as long as it has a browser. The solution is not limited to any certain operating system or any version of an operating system. Companies can use the rugged mobile terminals, tablets, laptops, smartphones, and other devices they prefer.

When we developed the enhanced, new version of the solution, STAEDEAN Dynamics Anywhere Mobility Studio for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Enterprise Edition, we introduced several improvements in the user experience in addition to making it easier to build and configure mobile apps. For example:

• What you’ll see immediately is that we redesigned the user interface to be more intuitive and attractive.
• Mobility Studio now comes with four dedicated work spaces where you can manage, design, monitor, and share your apps and code libraries.
• Charts with drill-down capabilities help you get to needed information faster and with less searching.
• When you create a new app, you can now use a preview to see what your design and process will look like.
• Progressive navigation lets you make quick, single-click transitions from applications to processes, to mobile pages, and to mobile-page elements.
• Task guides simplify the process of building apps and let you work faster.

New functionality also makes Mobility Studio more usable and powerful. If you previously used Dynamics Anywhere apps in Dynamics AX 2009, AX 2012, or in another Dynamics 365 deployment, you can now import them into your current Dynamics 365 environment instead of creating them anew.

Finally, we are about to complete development of a new Test Manager, a tool for streamlining app testing by means of automation and in batches.

Having observed trials runs of the new Mobility Studio, we can confirm that these user experience enhancements and streamlined app building tools are going to be effective in enabling mobile digital transformation.