Over the last decade we have seen immense progress in the development of handheld computers.  One of the first ones I owned, way back in 1996, was the Psion5.  In its day it was being used by many companies for running basic office applications and allowing employees to keep in touch with the office via email whenever they were on the road.  The thing that made it appealing for me was the combination of full QWERTY keyboard  and touch screen interface.  The Psion range of handheld computers was actually a major achievement in packaging and in terms of usability it was up there with anything that Apple had to offer at the time.

Over the years we have seen a number of different handheld computers hit the market including the Palm, BlackBerry and various Windows Mobile based computers.  Each model has seen progress being made in CPU performance, screen resolution and increased hard drive capacity.  In fact many of today’s handhelds are nearly capable  of running full blown office applications.  One of the more significant developments to come out of Psion was the Symbian operating system, this was a joint venture with Nokia and Ericsson in 1998 with the aim of developing customised applications to run on mobile phones.  The only problem was that Symbian was way ahead of its time and unfortunately the mobile platforms back then were not able to fully utilise the powerful features of Symbian.  Symbian was very much regarded as one of the key enablers to allowing companies to develop their own mobile applications and allow integration with back office systems.

Today, both BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices dominate the market and these handhelds are starting to allow the ‘mobilisation’ of enterprise systems. These devices have excellent ergonomics and perform very well, but there is a new competitor about to enter the market, a company that has a strong reputation for developing excellent user interfaces and stylish portable devices, Apple.  Apple developed the first graphical user interface running on their Apple Lisa computer, but more recently their iPod music player has become an industry leader.  Now, Apple are looking to repeat this success with their iPhone.

The iPhone has only just hit the streets in the U.S, but already we have seen a press release from Netsuite saying that they are going to port their enterprise applications to the iPhone.  This is significant as it means that users of the iPhone will be able to get access to enterprise solutions such as CRM and ERP packages.  Key to this is the delivery of applications via the iPhone’s Safari web browser and the ability to use these applications through a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model.  I will discuss SaaS in another post but it essentially allows you to use software via the internet or private network without having to have the application actually loaded on the computer.  Delivering applications in this way now means that handheld computers or ‘multi-use’ devices such as the iPhone can be used to integrate to back office solutions.

The press release from Netsuite, discussed over on silicon.com, is significant as you can guarantee that there will be many more companies out there looking to develop SaaS based custom applications for the iPhone.  So the question is, how long will it be before companies are able to get access to their B2B infrastructure via the iPhone?

B2B and EDI infrastructures are extremely complex and many of the more important applications were never really designed with portable computing in mind, after all a few years ago, who would want to complete an invoice or purchase order whilst out of the office?  A more likely application would be for a logistics or supply chain manager to quickly check on the performance of his trading partners or to check on the number of orders that have been successfully processed in say the last month.  What if you could check on the location of any shipment worldwide by simply using a customised version of Google Earth that could run on the iPhone?, that would have to be the holy grail of logistics visibility solutions.

GXS have a number of B2B applications that could be developed at some point in the future to run within a ‘mobile trading’ environment and we already have a world leading application integration solution to allow back office integration to leading enterprise solutions such as SAP.  So what would an iPhone based B2B trading platform look like?, well here is a mock-up that I produced, not much detail!, but then again it would have to be simple and easy to use to stay in the same mould as other Apple based applications. 

In summary, the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms have transformed the way in which office applications are used on the move. The hardware is now able to run the applications efficiently, the operating systems and applications allow integration to back office solutions, therefore I wonder how long it will be before a B2B trading platform can be fully mobilised?

So I have spent the last couple of days preparing for a media interview this morning on RFID usage in automotive.  Now I don’t claim to be the world expert on RFID but from the various articles and websites that I have seen over the past 48 hours it is clear to me that there are significant benefits for automotive companies to adopt RFID technology.  Apologies, RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification and it is essentially deployed via small tags that are fixed to components or completed products.

If I were a manufacturer of a high end luxury car, or expensive aftermarket parts I would be very keen to understand where my car or parts were in the supply chain.   Having visibility of parts movements etc is critical to improving the efficiency of a supply chain and yet the adoption of RFID technology still seems to be at a relatively low level in the automotive sector, well from what I have seen so far anyway.

There seem to be a few issues, firstly the cost associated with implementing the RFID tags on the components / products and more importantly who actually picks up the cost of fitting the tags.  Then there is the small matter of establishing a global network of RFID readers at all ports, warehouses and logistics distribution centres.  Finally there is the importance of data quality, how can you be sure that the RFID tag attached to a container is actually carrying the parts listed on the Tag?. Encoding the tags is a largely manual process and when you introduce a human element to any process there is always the chance of a problem or error being introduced to the supply chain process.

There seems to be a lack of global standards to clearly define the quality of the product information that goes onto the tags or rather that the information is correctly encoded onto the tags. I guess like everything else this will be resolved one day but for the moment successful visibility of a supply chain using RFID technology is reserved for the larger automotive companies.

Over the last couple of days I found that Jaguar, in partnership with Unipart Logistics in the UK,  have successfully setup a real time aftermarket parts tracking system from their factory in the UK to distribution centres in New York and Oakland, California in the U.S.  This works through a network of RFID readers setup at specific ports that Jaguar use to ship their parts out of the UK and into the U.S . This has to be the holy grail of real time parts tracking and this has only been set up within the last year.  So why has it taken so long to get this far?

The automotive sector has always been widely regarded as leading the way with implementing any form of technology, lets hope that the RFID  system implemented at Jaguar can be deployed on a more wider basis so that more companies can benefit from having access to more accurate, real time supply chain information.