Frontline Worker Edu-material
We've put together a reference list of materials to help you discover more about the applications and use-cases for industrial mobile workers today. (The "frontline" workforce.) The list below highlights some of the most comprehensive educational materials we've been able to find available right now. Reviewing these materials will help you understand the state-of-the-art in industrial mobile applications, and better prepare you to support these rapidly evolving technologies.
Google Android currently dominates the industrial mobile market. As such, here's a great video from Google that demonstrates using Android to develop frontline worker applications. It begins with some excellent information on frontline workers and why their experience is foundational to understanding the future of retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and many other industries. It then goes on to present a few real-world customer use case examples that demonstrate what companies are actually building and deploying. (It also contains a fair amount of blatant advertising for the Android platform. But hey! Fair's fair, and Google employees need to eat too.)
Next we'd like to highlight ClearBox consulting out of the UK. They are a consulting firm with a focus on frontline and mobile workers. Their reports are comprehensive and detailed! ("Comprehensive" => lengthy. Grab a cup of joe, and kick back for a good long read.) In particular, their, "buyer’s guide to employee mobile apps", lists a plethora of currently available frontline worker applications along with ClearBox's ratings and rankings. (Note: this is by no means ALL of the frontline workers applications on the market today, but it is an excellent inventory.) We also like ClearBox's distinction between frontline worker applications and the concept of an employee intranet. This is a good architectural distinction for those building solutions for their frontline workforce.
From here we branch to information provided by some of the frontline worker platforms themselves. These will (obviously) be biased by the platforms that are providing them, but they are still educational. And, don't forget to look at the references cited on some of these links for more info!
For example, here's a blog post from Workday, a provider in the HCM and employee engagement and training categories.
Here's a repository of information from Beekeeper, a platform player in frontline worker applications. (Who just happen to have the same stock photo on their website as the ClearBox report listed above.🙂 )
VMWare has a post overviewing what a frontline worker is
A google query such as, "site:zebra.com frontline worker" will net you a list of posts from Zebra with their info on the frontline. (Replace Zebra.com with your favorite technology provider to get their take on it.)
Finally, here's a blog post from Honeywell. Again, check out the reference cited at the end for more info!
That’s some of the best we’ve found. How about you? Do you have other sources of frontline worker information you'd like to share? Are there other concepts or use-cases in industrial mobility that you feel are not being adequately discussed? Please drop us a note and let us know! We would be happy to get the information out to our community. And, thank you in advance!
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