mubaloo mibeacons in enterprise 2015

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Beacons in Enterprise - the opportunitiesThis paper explores how beacons can help businesses drive innovation by delivering the right context, improving operations and business intelligence.

2015

Beacons in Enterprise 3

Introduction 3

What are Beacons? 4

Barriers to beacons 4

Enterprise opportunities 5

Engineers, maintenance and other field based roles 5

Construction 6

Healthcare 7

Transport 7

Travel and Leisure 8

Logistics 9

Across industry 10

Success in Enterprise 11

Conclusion 13

Beacons in Enterprise - the opportunities

Contents

Beacons in Enterprise Introduction Technology and tools have always helped organisations to be

more efficient, find new revenue opportunities and create better

ways of doing business. One technology that companies are

currently looking at, to make improvements to operations and

interaction with end users, is Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons.

Though the technology is still in the relatively early stages of

discovery and implementation, beacons have already been used

at sports venues, by retailers, at events, to help blind people

access cities, to create smart safety alerts and for asset tracking.

Examples of beacons in practise span across both consumer and

enterprise use cases.

This white paper will focus on how beacons are helping

businesses from a B2B and B2E perspective. In many cases the

implementations discussed will have knock on effects on other

parts of the business, delivering potential benefits wider than the

initial implementation. For example, engineers being able to

complete checks in half the time, compared to manual processes,

minimises disruption and saves on costs. On a wider level, this

also means that office based staff get quicker access to

information about assets and are better informed as to the length

of time it takes to maintain them.

This paper isn’t intended to cover the opportunities for beacons in

retail. That is a subject that will be covered in an upcoming white

paper from MiBeacons, which will discuss ways to best implement

beacons and create compelling user experiences, that help to

increase sales and improve operations.

Beacons in Enterprise - the opportunities 3

What are Beacons?

Beacons are Low Energy Bluetooth devices that help to link

physical objects with mobile devices by providing a presence and

triggering an action within apps. As a location aware technology,

designed to be used both in-door and outdoors, beacons help to

provide the right context, in the right location, based on a users

proximity. Beacons are seen as a way to improve the user

experience by providing the information that users need.

Barriers to beacons

For Beacons to work and be effective, Bluetooth needs to be

turned on and the right app needs to be installed. Beacons are

real world triggers for digital, in-app actions. From an enterprise

perspective, this provides a number of advantages when

implementing beacons from a B2B and B2E perspective, where

lower barriers of adoption exist.

Firstly, companies will control the on-site experience across their

facilities or sites. Secondly, they will have a granular understanding

of the devices being used. Thirdly, they will be able to encourage

employees to keep their Bluetooth turned on, or use MDM to

enforce it. Finally, they will have greater control over encouraging

the use of apps and creating the right experiences to help

improve operations.


Enterprise opportunities Whilst beacons aren’t the magical answer for every business or

every situation, in many instances, they could prove to be

transformational and save millions in costs and time.

Beacons are an enabler, an assistive technology that help to

connect physical objects or spaces with mobile devices. In the

simplest terms, they help to provide what a user needs, in the

right location, at the right time.

If we look at some of the use cases of beacons, we see that they

can benefit everything from fieldwork, construction, healthcare,

transportation and travel and leisure.

Engineers, maintenance and other field based roles

Across a range of industries, there are millions of field workers on

the front line, on building sites, conducting maintenance, carrying

out engineering work, building or farming.

Often, engineers’ time will be spent going to every asset, checking

it, logging information about it and, if required, spending time

maintaining it. In many cases, they may be equipped with paper

based documentation, or a mobile device to log the information.

In each case, time would be spent logging each part of the

process or finding relevant documentation.

Beacons help to reduce the amount of time this process takes, by

giving each asset a presence and intelligence. With beacons,

when an engineer approaches each asset, it can trigger past

service history and then provide the engineer with exactly what

they need, based on the asset they are in front of.


This information is then useful to other parts of the business. For

example, an office based manager would be able to see data

about how long jobs take. They could see whether some

engineers take longer to complete jobs or, conversely, don’t spend

long enough. They can use the information to provide the right

training to employees, or refine the process flow within an app to

provide the right information.

By utilising other sensors, that can log the temperature, electricity,

humidity, pressure or others, the potential is for the engineer to

focus on the assets that need attention. This would be based on

being able to gather the information when the engineer is there,

and for the assets to talk to them, rather than having to check

everything manually. From the interaction with beacons, the

information can be collected and fed into the company’s backend,

to help with business intelligence.

Taking this and applying it to any scenario, where you have an

existing machine, product or space that would benefit from

having ‘connectivity,' can reveal where beacons add value.

Beacons connect these items with mobile devices to help drive

better user discovery and intelligence.

In one example we have seen, a company is wanting to use

beacons to save around 30 seconds off its on-site process. When

applied across its field team, this saving means the equivalent of

over £10 million savings from productivity improvements.

Construction

Construction is one of the most obvious places for the use of

beacons, as they can be placed anywhere and easily moved from

site to site. By placing beacons on site, the right information can

be made available based on where employees are, or the task

they are doing.

Due to the changing conditions on site, beacons can be added to

an asset to help track it, should it get moved around. It makes

using technology on site far more seamless and far more efficient,

as deployment can be adapted easily.

If implemented properly, beacons provide a security net for

employees or others visiting the site. By entering into a beacon

range, a safety alert can be triggered which needs to be


acknowledged by employees, via a wearable or on their mobile

devices. This can have obvious benefits from a site safety and

legal perspective, for both the employee and the company.

Thinking beyond this, connecting beacons with sensors will allow

companies to evaluate conditions on site. Integrating beacons

with sensors can help to identify when an environment is no

longer safe or suitable for construction workers to be in. At the

moment, health and safety assessments are done manually.

Having the ability to monitor and analyse working environments

via smart sensors could help to alleviate some of the strain on

resources and provide companies with continuous tracking.

For some construction sites, companies prevent employees from

using a mobile phone or tablet on site for health and safety

reasons. Wearables pair with mobile phones or tablets, which

means that beacons can trigger the right information or digital

tool (app) to be displayed on a device that is attached to the user.

Healthcare

In healthcare, beacons can trigger apps to provide patients and

staff with the right information, at the right time and in the right

place. This could include information about how to navigate

around a hospital, delivered via voice prompts or on screen

messages. Equally, it could be used to bring up the right patient

information, allowing doctors to easily make updates, without

having to spend time looking for specific notes.

Following conversations with various healthcare providers, it has

become apparent that beacons hold a lot of promise to help

provide better information to both employees and patients. They

can be used for everything from asset tracking and information,

to navigation around hospitals.

This could be everything from a beacon that would alert hospital

admin staff when patients arrive, to helping guide patients to the

right location within the hospital, based on where they enter.

Transport

The technology used by much of the rail transport network has

been in place for decades. As rail services are improved, and as

the drive for intelligence and smarter, more efficient services

comes to the fore, beacons and other location aware technology,


driven by mobile devices, hold many opportunities. This is also an

industry where delays can be costly for operators, so there is a

large financial interest in making improvements.

In the transport industry, context is important from both an

internal and external perspective. Better intelligence can be fed

through to help provide rail companies with better intelligence

about the status of trains, their location, schedule cards and

maintenance alerts or issues. This information can also be used to

provide customers with better information about delays, or even

how busy certain services may be.

Beacons can be utilised to help to create driver advisory tools

that provide drivers with context based on their location,

especially in areas with poor GPS coverage. Beacons can also be

utilised to improve the accuracy of GPS, when properly integrated

along routes.

The transport network has to deal with a large number of

different assets that can also be given awareness and other

sensors to help those maintaining them. As with the examples

mentioned in the construction industry, it would be possible to

utilise beacons to provide easier access to information and workflows.

Travel and Leisure

The travel and leisure market is severely untapped by current

beacon deployments. Yet this is an industry, which from both an

operational and user experience perspective, stands to benefit the

most from location awareness.

Beacons have the ability to provide information to users in their

native language, by triggering the right information at the right

time. London is one of the world’s top tourist destinations, yet

very few signs are in anything other than English. Whilst English is

one of the most spoken languages in the world, visitors may not

be as proficient as signage may suggest.

This is where beacons come in. By placing them on signs, in

tourist locations and across the transport network, information in

the user's local language can be triggered, via an app, in front of

the user.


The technology could be placed around airports, so that

notifications of delays and gate assignments could be delivered

instantly to passengers’ mobile devices. Taking it a step further,

beacons placed in transport hubs could push other value-added

services to passengers, like transfer or car hire information.

From an enterprise perspective, beacons could also be used in

other transport hubs, including ferry ports or freight train stations,

to send alerts and collect logistics data to be sent to back office

systems. As with other industries, asset management and

maintenance could also be improved through the use of beacons,

helping to provide greater intelligence to facilities management or

engineering roles.

Logistics

Some logistics firms are also interested in using beacons for the

whole logistics cycle. This includes picking and packing in the

warehouse, through to loading onto the vehicle and using it as a

security and health and safety feature for all operatives.

For example, if a user walks into a particular area where special

equipment is required, and it isn’t detected, the user can be

alerted and information can be sent back in real-time to the

controller to monitor the situation. Additionally, this could also be

used to track whether users enter areas that aren’t safe.

Due to logistics companies providing a very particular service,

they need to present their customers with a very defined

structure. The difficulty is that each client has different

requirements, but the logistics company needs to roll out the

same structure to everyone, in order to keep costs down and their

systems aligned. Beacons are a perfect solution as they can be

repurposed and tailored for each client’s needs, but integrated

into a central system that can be used for everyone.

Other advantages of using beacons is the ease of scale and cost.

Typically, beacons work out to be significantly cheaper than NFC

tags, for example and have far more applications. For logistics

firms, the main opportunities with beacons come from an

operational, enterprise point of view.


Across industry

As with apps, what works well in one industry can also be applied

to other industries to improve operations. Though the examples

above have been industry specific, they essentially focus on the

following use cases:

• Automatic login

• Contextual information alerts

• Process prompting

• Asset management

• Information delivery

• User assistance

• Navigation assistance

With beacons, companies are essentially creating context aware,

location based apps that can help to drive business intelligence.

They are using the beacons to trigger a certain action that aids

the user journey, removing steps that could otherwise take time.

It may well be that a single app utilises all of the examples used

above. For example, when an employee arrives in a location, the

app would automatically log them in. The app would know who

the user is, it would then trigger the right contextual information,

based on who they are and what they need. This could then

prompt them to follow the right process for their job. They will

then engage with the assets they are near in the right way for

their job type. The app would give them the right information,

helping to assist them and possibly navigate them elsewhere.

Outside of the core user, other parts of the business can get

access to better intelligence about how work is being carried out.


Success in Enterprise Apps don’t need to use beacons to work. What the technology

provides, however, is a way to improve the experience and

provide context. This is because beacons provide an

environmental context that make the information, data and views

within the app relevant.

Whilst it is easy to argue that beacons may not be relevant for all

situations, when the use case is there, the value they provide has

the potential to save companies millions in improved productivity.

In one case, we have seen a company that has hundreds of field

engineers, across wide geographical areas, experiment with the

technology to improve check-in and the on-site process. By doing

this, the company anticipates that it could save tens of millions of

pounds from the improved workflow and enhancements to its operations.

Not only will the company be able to drive improvements to the

way its field team works, but it would also be able to use it as a

way to increase the number of contracts it has, by explaining the

improvements to potential customers.

This is something that we are seeing from companies who are

looking to utilise the technology time and time again. Those who

do this, not only see the use of the technology as a way to make

improvements to operations, but also as a way to help build

compelling USPs when selling their services on to the companies,

or consumers they target.

Hyper-location awareness and contextual intelligence has the

ability to help drive a vast number of improvements to the ways in


which businesses operate and the insight they can gather. 2015

should see this technology continuing to prove its worth and

being deployed in ever more useful ways. Beacons are an enabler,

a way to make life easier, processes more fluid and a connecter

for physical objects and digital devices.

Workplaces are evolving with new working expectations from the

newer generations, the explosion of mobile devices and a more

“unstructured” approach to work. For those sectors where the

work force is out on multiple sites, access to data regarding those

sites is required. From current site status, e.g health and safety

requirements, numbers of employees, environmental data, to site

documents and procedures, mobility is essential for efficiency.

One key area where beacons will come into their own is with

industries that seek to utilise wearable technology. With the

reduced screen size, one of the major challenges of wearables is

around how to navigate to what a user needs at a given time.

Beacons help to solve this by telling the wearable, or paired

smartphone, what that user likely needs.

An example of this in action is an engineer approaching an asset

and the wearable knowing that it needs to bring up the right

information about that asset, without the user manually

navigating to the right content. This would then bring up the right

process flow or data that helps that engineer to do their job,

without having to get a phone or tablet out, or indeed navigating

via the wearable.

Beacons and wearables are all part of the growing world of The

Internet of Things, where objects and devices are able to

communicate with each other. Where apps on mobile phones

have been moving towards a way of controlling an environment,

wearables take that one step further by removing the need to

hold a device.


Beacons trigger apps,triggering contextual

information on

wearables

Conclusion When using technology, it’s important to use it because it helps to

achieve business objectives and solve challenges. Trying to utilise

beacons without fully understanding the benefits or limitations of

the technology can lead to disappointment.

Companies need to start with what they want to achieve and

work backwards to find the technology that helps them reach

goals. Beacons have a definite role in helping to connect assets,

spaces and locations with mobile devices. When applied properly,

they can help companies to improve workflows, provide the right

information, or deliver the right tools into the hands of users.

The world is becoming increasingly connected. Those who apply

a strategic approach to their mobility implementations will often

find that they increase their chance of success. Throughout the

process of assessing different location aware technologies, it’s

important to test and assess whether the technology makes an

improvement, or whether it gets in the way.

Deploying beacons requires companies to consider how they will

manage them, which type of beacons they will implement, how

they will support future upgrades, whether they will open the IDs

up to third parties to utilise, and a variety of other considerations.

Beacons do require optimisation for deployment, they can’t just

be placed somewhere in the hope that they will just work.

Companies will need to take this into consideration and ensure

they are deploying them in the right way.

Innovation, at its core, is about improving the way a process or

action takes place. Mobile has, for many companies, massively


improved the way in which they operate. It’s technologies, like

beacons that help make companies more efficient, deliver the

right information and connect the dots between offline and online

behaviour.

When you apply that to the enterprise, the possibilities can be endless.

To view other white papers that discuss topics including strategy,

opportunities for wearables in enterprise or how to approach

mobile security please visit http://mubaloo.com/news-info/

category/white-papers.


http://mubaloo.com/news-info/category/white-papers


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mubaloo mibeacons in enterprise 2015

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