Users taste mobile outsourcing

Determined to utilize mobile applications to improve operational efficiency, food chain Au Bon Pain is taking the outsourcing route to save time and money in getting wireless tools into its employees’ hands.

Faced with the prospect of managing the enterprise mobility equation on its own, from device acquisition to applications development, the company of more than 200 bakery and sandwich shops decided to hire an outsourcing specialist to handle almost every aspect of its strategy.

In a move that some market watchers contend will represent an increasingly popular model for launching and maintaining wireless business tools, executives with the company said that it made more sense to offload as much of the process as possible onto its partner, startup Enterprise Mobile, than it would have made to drive its mobile plans internally.

At the core of the company’s strategy is the development and distribution of a proprietary business management application delivered over Microsoft’s Windows Mobile architecture.

“There’s only so much we can do with almost unlimited demand on IT resources. Some projects you simply have to outsource,” said Ed Mockler, senior vice president of IT at Au Bon Pain. “This is very nascent technology; we believe it will be very powerful for us in the long run, but we don’t have the same level of access to carriers or Microsoft that a dedicated outsourcing partner could offer.”

Enterprise Mobile is handling everything from device selection and service contract negotiation to working with the eateries’ internal development teams to port its business application, dubbed the Daily P&L, from the PC to the handheld environment.

In addition to its ability to oversee nearly every aspect of its project, Mockler said that Enterprise Mobile’s specialization around the Windows Mobile platform was a crucial factor influencing its commitment to outsourcing.

While Research in Motion’s BlackBerry products remain the de facto leader in the enterprise mobility space, Mockler said that embracing Windows Mobile made the most sense for Au Bon Pain for a variety of different reasons.

Because Au Bon Pain already works with a number of Microsoft technologies, in particular its .Net applications development environment, the executive said it made far more sense to build around the software giant’s wireless products.

“Everyone makes a judgment call regarding technologies that will last and prove cost-effective. We thought that .Net would be that platform and felt that it was a prudent decision to continue in that direction with our mobile plans,” Mockler said. “We felt that there would be cohesion on all the platforms down the road and wanted to avoid challenges that could be created by a lot of handoffs between different technologies.”

By pushing the Daily P&L application from the laptop to the handheld, the executive said that Au Bon Pain’s field managers can respond to business challenges more quickly and shift their travels among the chain’s locations on the fly to address any emerging problems.

When the application was tied to the PC, managers typically planned their routes ahead of time based on where they expected to be needed. Now the workers can garner detailed operational information in real time and move to cut off any business issues as they emerge, he said.

Moving forward, Au Bon Pain is hoping to port other internal applications, including staffing management and forecasting tools onto handheld devices. Mockler said that the decision to adopt a mobile outsourcing strategy has already allowed the company to accelerate its planning for those future projects.

Mort Rosenthal, chief executive of Enterprise Mobile, said that most businesses are only now getting to the stage in their wireless initiatives where the prospect of using outsourced services makes sense.

IT departments and line-of-business teams have handled the process of selecting devices and negotiating calling plans up until now, but as customers grow into more mature, applications-driven aspects of their planning, acquiring the services of a dedicated mobility partner is becoming a more appealing alternative to keeping operations in-house, he said.

“There are so many moving pieces that as companies attempt to take more of their business applications to the handheld platform, they’re realizing that the whole process can become very time-consuming and expensive,” Rosenthal said. “As with any outsourcing decision, when companies reach the point where mobility is becoming too much of a burden on IT departments, more customers will decide to head in this direction.”

As for Windows Mobile, Rosenthal said that the Microsoft platform is also benefiting from growing maturity among companies regarding the types of applications they hope to push to the handheld. Prior to launching Enterprise Mobile in late 2007, Rosenthal founded Corporate Software, considered one of the earliest and most successful resellers of Microsoft’s Windows and Office technologies.

“BlackBerry carved out a great market based primarily on mobile e-mail, but as companies move to push more complex applications into the wireless domain, in particular those already built and running on Microsoft technologies, there will be growing adoption of Windows Mobile,” Rosenthal said. “Companies want to take advantage of their existing investments in other Microsoft products.”