The app economy with intelligent mobile business processes will become a productivity boost for the German economy - if companies recognize and use the opportunity.
German society shares with most other industrialized nations a characteristic that threatens to have a negative effect on the further development of prosperity: it is rapidly aging. As you know, this means fewer and fewer workers are available to take care of the many non-workers.
From this situation, there is probably only one effective way out: we must increase our productivity noticeably. At the moment, however, it does not look too rosy in this respect, because in the last decade productivity in Germany has increased at an anemic rate of just 0.9 percent per year - according to most experts, far too little to come in the future to create the growth needed to maintain prosperity.
To make matters worse, German companies are still reluctant to seize the opportunities offered by today's main productivity driver: digitization. Despite the popularization of the topic with the slogan "Industry 4.0", SMEs in particular are lagging behind the international trend. At the same time, technology experts in the digitized economy are confident that they will achieve an enormous increase in efficiency and productivity.Philipp Weirauch, CEO of CheckMobile , a provider of cloud- based business software, for example, says : "We are facing a productivity boost that is only comparable to that of using the Internet at the beginning of the new millennium: By bringing together independently developed software Technologies - namely mobile devices with associated business apps, cloud computing and big data solutions - enable small and large companies to build entirely new business processes, vastly improve their already existing productivity and, even without much know-how, their exact operation developing coordinated business software. The digitized app-Economy is using more and more artificial intelligence to automate the entire value chain without process breakages, from office work to app-controlled production to the all-digital supply chain. Of course, the companies have to be active themselves, of course. Reluctance and muddling has never contributed to progress. "
Unique technology constellation
In fact, mobile business apps based on a flexible infrastructure open up completely new perspectives for dynamic companies. This is thanks to the widespread use of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) in companies, which allow employees to access important applications at any time and from any location.
In combination with intelligent business software, which can quickly process information from the backend and process it in a user-friendly way, processes can be accelerated and executed reliably even by employees with lower qualifications. Crucial here is that the process software no longer has to be in the form of large packages in the IT department of the company, but can be used as a particularly easy-to-use app via the Internet - ideally directly via a cloud solution that controls the process and Processing takes over. Modern solutions allow a quick adaptation of the apps to new situations, without the user having to provide appreciable own programming effort.
Advances in app development
Herein lies the key advancement of app development: Backend and mobile communicate through the cloud and are connected to intelligent business software that streamlines and accelerates data collection, editing and reporting processes, supports informed decision making, and sends new information back to the back office reports. Using the cloud in a very simple way broadens the concept from purely in-house processes to the entire network of partners, suppliers and customers, resulting in a highly integrated, intelligent and dynamic infrastructure that enables lightning-fast response to new market demands or other change needs.
Large process chains (such as scheduling drivers in logistics, managing and executing service orders, monitoring maintenance intervals, handling incoming and outbound delivery processes, or handling returns and documentation) can be precisely controlled, documented, and web-based by anyone use mobile device.
What seems so obvious is not a trivial development, but the result of the most sophisticated IT intelligence. Because the interaction of these technologies can only develop their efficiency effect if it succeeds in reducing the complexity of all processes involved in such a way that all processes can proceed as quickly and simply as necessary, as sovanta CEO Michael Kern emphasizes: "The decisive question is accordingly how to intelligently hide the complexity of mobile app development, thereby simplifying the use of applications. "
The developers have long since found ways to shield the user from the complexity of the processes. In the most intelligent approaches, the control processes are decoupled from the infrastructure and moved to their own, separate level, so that individual adjustments and rapid process changes require no intervention in the operations and can be done in real time and without disrupting the operation. The complexity of modern business software can thus be limited to a lower IT level, while process control is redirected to fairly simple processes (such as simple queries) within a separate user level.
Less-skilled employees can now control processes that previously required in-depth IT knowledge-such as mobile monitoring of material flows and sharing data with business software in the back office, or retrieving real-time information from enterprise databases during service and maintenance Submit updates back. Individual changes in the processes can also be mapped directly into new transactions without the hassle and disruption of ongoing operations.
