Everybody’s going to go wireless. Wires are expensive, and so are the infrastructure, the support personnel, and the office space. Wireless technology allows you to work from home — it will help U.S. workers have more family time.
If you have a wireless product that works on any platform or browser, that’s a gold mine.
What’s important is the ability for your product to integrate. Everybody has to link together. If you cannot integrate, you can’t be successful.
Vince Cordo, Jr.
DBA/Applications Specialist
CyberShift, Inc.
Parsippany, NJ
Linking data on inventory movement to CRM by wireless can be enormously valuable. There’s no one software that does it all, but there are a variety of integrators out there to make it all work.
What’s coming? The big companies like Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, are breaking trail for wireless use. That’ll bring prices down, then it’ll become the norm in the market, as widespread as the Internet, and every guy on the dock will have one of these wireless devices of some sort. The possibilities are as limited as your creativity, although it’s going to be more significant on the business side than on the consumer side.
One of the reasons for the popularity of wireless is that the knowledge base needed to learn how to use it is very low. If you know the alphabet and can count to ten, you can use one of these devices. I frequently need to be able to give a wireless device to, say, a 48-year-old technician, and he has to be able to learn how to use it in a couple of hours, and it’s entirely possible.
Bruno Kelpsas
Project Manager, Wireless
eFORCE, Inc.
McLean, VA
I think you can assume that in the next five to ten years, it will be pretty commonplace for consumers to be able to check inventory before they go into a store. Bar code scanners will be available on a PDA or cell phone. So you can hit a button on a wireless PDA, for instance, and scan the camera or stereo system or whatever it is you want to buy. You could get competitive offers from catalog or Internet retailers in a one-button, 30-second process. Of course, the retailers would have to build the online inventory management and back-end systems to handle it.
David Schehr
Research Director
Retail & Travel Industries, U.S.
Gartner
Stamford, CT
Specific to fulfillment, proprietary solutions are giving way to industry solutions. Shipping and delivery companies increasingly are pushing delivery documentation, routing information, and even GIS maps down to individual agents using hand-held devices. Proof of delivery (POD) entered at the keyboard or using signature capture, with that information pushed back up the delivery chain to the shipper, is fully deliverable today.
Local package delivery services using wireless-over-Internet dispatching report 20% increases in driver productivity and up to 30% increases in dispatcher productivity.
As traditional retail, direct, and e-merchants converge and move toward seamless multi-channel strategies, wireless will also play a larger role end to end. Customers may move to the use of hand-held devices to make in-store selections as well as purchases over the Internet, or to place in-store orders to be picked up later.
Larry S. Landis, President
Marketrends, Inc.
Indianapolis, IN
Wireless can expand your business; wireless technology can dramatically shorten business processes. Also, going wireless is a more cost-effective way of doing business.
On the buyer side, wireless technology can add an additional channel; buyers can handle more suppliers. A company can obtain customer profiles remotely, connecting to a customer database to obtain information digitally. And wireless devices can check real-time information. Someone who has a hand-held can check e-mail anywhere at anytime with no limitations.
Youngro Kim
Planning and Marketing Team
Moinsoft Co., Ltd.
Seoul, South Korea