The Great Mobility Debate has been rearing it’s head a lot lately at various industry conferences. This inevitably leads to questions regarding BYOD vs. platform standardization, connectivity requirements, and data sync between the work of maintenance techs in the field and a centralized online database. This sparked our own interest about how customers were using our mobile property management App, BE-Mobile. Over a 30- day period, we tracked a statistically relevant sample of 70 client companies and 29,500 transactions to determine usage patterns. The results clearly underscored the importance of mobile property management apps that work seamlessly while offline or in areas of low connectivity and offer compatibility with major platforms and devices (including Android, iOS and Blackberry).
Nearly seventy five percent (75%) of the sample users experienced intermittent lapses in connectivity, each lasting an average of two hours and resulting in the necessary completion of 10% of transactions while offline. Additionally, the study determined that 44% of organizations and 80% of the top 10 heaviest users, operate a mixed platform of mobile devices. These results highlight the growth of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), the policy of permitting employees to bring and use personally owned mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and smart phones) to their workplace, across the commercial real estate operations space.
These numbers really tell the story of why great offline and multi-platform support is critical to a mobile program and why it’s important to select a property and tenant management system (with accompanying App) that provides your team with access to the complete solution from any mobile device, allowing them to work from anywhere without interruption.
BE-Mobile allows users to access all relevant data and complete all tasks even without connectivity. When a user regains connectivity, BE Mobile “True Sync” seamlessly syncs with the web-based platform, retaining 100% accurate time stamping on the record. According to the study, 1 in 10 mobile actions would be blocked with online-only solutions, and in extreme cases, 4 in 10 actions would be affected, crippling mobile service delivery.
Make sure your data is synched
BE-Mobile is available for download in the iTunes, Google, and Blackberry App stores.
