7 ways to make the most of Beacons in the Enterprise |Beaconstac

blog.beaconstac.com /2015/02/beacons-in-the-enterprise-7-ways-to-make-the-most-of-it/

Beacons, the low-powered transmitters that have so far been known for transforming sectors like retail,museums and hotels are quickly making inroads into other consumer-facing domains too.

But are beacons useful in increasing backend process efficiency as well? In this blog post, we analysehow beacons can play a vital role in enterprise security, productivity and process optimisation. In an earlierblog post on ‘Beacons in the Workplace’, we talked about how these BLE devices can be used foremployee time tracking, improving staff productivity, booking meeting rooms and more.

Today, we will talk about how beacons can be used to streamline processes and monitoring, maintainingand managing an organization’s assets. Businesses are often faced with operational challenges stemmingfrom the lack of visibility into real-time location, status and condition of inventory, assets, staff, equipmentand other problems. Since overall operational efficiency relies on such key success factors, its imperativethat these problems are tackled effectively.

This is where beacons come into the picture. Beacons, with their location sensing capability, can help keeptrack of location of your staff within office premises and inventory in the warehouse.

Let’s look at some common use cases for beacons in the Enterprise:

1. Inventory Management and Tracking: Accurate inventory visibility is critical to optimizing business

management processes and reducing unnecessary losses stemming from product unavailability. Beaconscan be used for inventory tracking of when items enter or leave an area, such as a store, warehouse, or acentralized distribution area, in real-time . The system (built around beacons, a beacon managementplatform and warehouse database) can automatically alert relevant staff upon shortage or surplus ofinventory in an area.

Some of the advantages of using beacons for inventory management include:

-Locating critical equipment

-Reducing inventory time

-Achieving real-time physical inventory of assets, enhancing productivity by remotely monitoring assetsand infrastructure

-Delivering more timely information for decision making

-Improving security by preventing assets from leaving premises

2. Asset Tracking: Current manual processes of locating equipment are labor intensive and inefficient.Using iBeacon technology staff are able to quickly and accurately locate assets without having to searchfor it everywhere.

Some of the advantages of using beacons for asset tracking include:

-Reducing over-purchasing and equipment rental costs

-Improving staff efficiency and workflow by reducing search times and wait times for ordered equipment

-Increasing equipment utilization

-Automating inventory management

-Reducing equipment shrinkage and loss

3. Process Optimization: Beacons can be used to improve processes within an organization. A goodexample is Japan Airlines’ use of beacons to help managers locate frontline staff and assign tasks to thembased on where they were at that particular moment. Staff near boarding gates could be asked to helpcustomers board the flight etc. This helped them enhance their customer experience to a great extent.

4. Security management teams: The efficiency of teams that are responsible for patrolling buildings canbe monitored using beacons. By placing beacons around such buildings, it can be ensured that eachmember of the team has covered the necessary checkpoints that need to be checked to ensure security. Ifthat does not happen, a notification is triggered to the concerned department.

5. In the construction and maintenance Industry: Beacons can be placed in areas of high risk, or onmachinery, to push contextual back-end server information to mobile apps. This data can include productinformation, alerts and checklists, as well as critical health and safety documentation for employees whenout in the field. Jobs that require checklists to be ticked off, can utilise beacons to activate the correct listfor the right environment, improving user experience.

6. In transport and logistics enterprises: Beacons placed in transport hubs could be used to push value-added services such as transfer or car hire information to passengers as soon as they get out of theairport. They could also be used in other transport hubs including ferry ports or freight train stations to sendalerts and collect logistics data.

7. Mobile device management (MDM) at organizations: At the moment, if an organization needs to disablemobile device features on office premises, they are disabled across the entire campus or building. Inreality, however, there are only certain areas that require features or apps to be temporarily disabled. MDMcan be enhanced by beacons to enable or disable features such as, the camera, microphone or volumesettings. This will give organisations better control of employee mobile devices to ensure secure companydata isn’t compromised.

Thus, beacons provide innumerable opportunities in the enterprise. Are there any other use cases you canthink of? Let me know in the comments below.