On the road again

Peng-Sang Cau figures that mobility is the ideal way to appease her guilt on the work and the home front. “It seems that working moms feel guilty about everything in our lives – either we feel we don’t do enough on the job or we don’t do enough for our kids.”

Ms. Cau is president, CEO and co-founder of Transformix Engineering Inc., a small Kingston-based engineering and contract manufacturing company with a growing client base that includes oil and gas, medical, consumer and packaged goods operations. Like some small businesses, she has found that installing a mobile system has been a lifesaver –on the home front as well as the business front.

But surprisingly few small businesses are taking advantage of mobile systems, or even using them the right way, experts say. And server-based systems can be a safe and flexible way to boost productivity, those who use them say. Given the fact that Ms. Cau’s clients are all over the map, putting the mobile infrastructure in place has meant she can negotiate deals out of the office, whether it’s travelling in Austria or sitting in a local coffee shop. “What we do as a business requires a particular flexibility,” she says.

But less than 40 per cent of small and mid-sized businesses have an active program to move their applications to a mobile platform, says Ed Daugavietis, senior analyst at London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group.

Gavin Steiner, president of Barrie Ont.-based Interprom Inc., a Microsoft certified small business specialist, notes that a lot of small business owners have attacked the mobility issue in a piecemeal way. “Even those that have mobile tools often don’t understand how to implement them, or simply do it wrong. In most cases for example, their remote access is unsecured and they’re carrying a lot of information with them. You don’t want to be doing that.”

Since laptops and PDAs are not safe places to keep your data, experts suggest a small business server. Choices range from purchasing and setting up your own (typical cost is less than $10,000) or for the micro-sized business, using a hosted service for a monthly fee.

“You want your laptop to be the window to your applications, not the holder of them,” Mr. Steiner says. “What you want is to be able to log in from anywhere in the world and actually work with applications, data, e-mail or any other application sitting on a server. That’s a much more secure and cost-effective way to do it.”

Having a server at the heart of your mobile strategy allows you to integrate any number of devices (smartphone, BlackBerry, wireless cards) and users – in some cases up to 75 on one server.

“Even six months ago it was expensive to do this, but data plans are coming down in price and delivering better quality services, so there aren’t the same boundaries [to mobility],” says Mr. Steiner.

Elaine Mah, marketing manager, Small and Mid-sized business for Intel of Canada Ltd. in Toronto, notes that advanced and integrated mobility options for the small business have definitely grown with the vast improvements in processing power and technology capabilities.

“It’s now possible to transfer large files. Wireless networks have increased in range and speed. Laptops are now on par with desktop systems for processing speed and performance,” she says.

Kelly McCrimmon, who serves triple duty as the owner, coach and general manager of the Brandon Wheat Kings hockey club in Manitoba, says productivity took a giant leap forward once he decided to move to a small business server to centralize applications for mobile access for himself and his nine staff members.

“I’m probably on the road about 120 nights a year. At the same time I need to be plugged into the day-to-day goings on of my office, my team and my scouts,” he says.

He has spent the past few years lugging his laptop with him wherever he went. But he admits that when it came to the IT systems, the business was “being held together with binder twine and duct tape. We needed to network better and share documents and calendars.”

Now that he has centralized it all with a Microsoft Windows Small Business Server, mobile access is easier and more efficient. “I can walk into the Delta Bow Valley hotel in Calgary, go the business centre, log on and bang, it’s exactly like sitting at my computer.” He has also configured his BlackBerry to work with the server.

Melani Deckert, president of Tuppen Construction Ltd., an Toronto-based provider of insurance reconstruction services, has gone the server route to deploy smartphone technology to estimators and managers in the field.

“Of course, we all had cell phones to call back and forth, but my people were on the road six or seven hours a day. If they called, it meant stopping on the road to write down information. That was time consuming and expensive. Estimators had to return to the office multiple times during the day to pick up documents.”

Now they can use their devices to take pictures at a site, record video clips, access e-mail, access applications at head office and, in some cases, produce digital forms for signing.

“Time has always been an issue,” says Ms. Deckert. “Now they only have to come into the office once in the morning and that’s it. Now with the gas prices the way they are, it’s more beneficial than ever.” Ms. Mah notes that an added bonus is that an integrated mobility strategy can let business operators engage in “time slicing” to better manage their day-to-day duties.

“They can take advantage of mobility to parse their day any way they like and that’s especially important for a small business owner, because they don’t work nine to five.”

That’s definitely the one benefit of a mobility strategy that Ms. Cau says far outweighs anything else. “When I pick my kids up, everything is turned off. When they’re in bed, it’s back on again. That’s the beautiful part.”

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