TechTarget’s Inaugural Award Recognizes Mobile Innovation in the Enterprise  

Boston – Kinvey, the leading enterprise Backend as a Service company, today announced that its customer, Bell and Howell, was named a winner in TechTarget’s Modern Mobility Innovation Awards, which recognize exceptionally innovative and successful enterprise mobility projects.

When selecting the winners of TechTarget’s inaugural Modern Mobility Innovation Awards, judges sought out companies that were enabling new ways to take advantage of mobility in the workplace, making major positive impacts to existing capabilities, or filling gaps in IT, development or user needs.  They also considered how the vendor’s product supported its customer’s need for ease-of-use, functionality, performance and value.  

Bell and Howell is a leading provider of communications and commerce solutions. With over 600 service personnel deployed throughout North America and Western Europe, field productivity is critical to revenue, costs and customer satisfaction. Bell and Howell’s Service Data Automation (SDA) program was launched in June 2016 to create an application that extends its SAP ERP system with mobility. The new field service app enables the company’s field service team to process service transactions, and respond quickly to customer requests while providing back-office operations with insight on service delivery and productivity. 

What makes Bell and Howell’s field service app innovative is its ability to deliver data from SAP systems seamlessly via a mobile backend as a service.  The field service app allows service personnel to work offline and still record information and complete transactions. For example, technicians can now work in a basement of a building with no cellular coverage, but can still have the data update automatically once they get to a point where they get reception.  

To make this project a reality, however, Bell and Howell needed to enable fast, easy and high-performing access to its SAP data, yet it lacked SAP mobile-development resources.  Bell and Howell turned to Kinvey to provide a cost-effective, zero-code, configurable integration to SAP as part of its full-featured mobile-application-development platform.  

“With an industry-leading field service organization, Bell and Howell jumped on the opportunity to use Kinvey to deliver lightning-quick field access to data-rich SAP systems,” said Jim Feely, senior vice president of global service solutions at Bell and Howell.  “With the new app, our technicians can view the history of a machine, share information and images, scan parts, create and view slow-motion videos, and – most importantly – capture true parts history. This allows us to know precisely how many hours or cycles a part has been in use, and preemptively replace it before it fails. It can also tell us if another technician encountered the same issue or has a required part in stock in a nearby city as opposed to the next time zone.” 

“We could not have delivered this app without Kinvey.  Extending SAP with mobility is a time-consuming and expensive task, but with Kinvey, we’ve been able to extend our SAP landscape for new mobile-use cases, and the performance has been unbelievable,” said Anubhav Gupta, director of SAP applications at Bell and Howell.  “Kinvey has helped us go from 14-second SAP data access down to 400-millisecond mobile-friendly data access with both online and offline operation – very important for our field team productivity.”

“Bell and Howell had the vision to transform its workforce experience with mobile technology, and we are proud to have been part of its solution,” said Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Kinvey. “It goes to show even a 109-year-old company can make the mobile enterprise a reality. There really isn’t anything holding businesses back from delivering on better customer and employee experiences through the use of digital technologies.”