The State of Enterprise Mobility: How Businesses are Using Mobile Apps

Enterprise mobility is a topic on the minds of many businesses as mobile use continues to rise in the workplace. Through the use of smartphones, tablets and wearable devices enterprises are streamlining their internal and external business processes, and rapidly transforming their work with mobile apps.

As companies continue to leverage mobile devices to perform key business processes, more data is becoming available about the usage of mobile apps—and the results are exciting. Not only are many of today’s enterprises using multiple apps, but they’re also building and deploying them more quickly than ever before. This is an indication that businesses are moving away from expensive, time-consuming custom application builds to cloud-based mobile enterprise app solutions.

Recently, Canvas released data from their 2015 mobile app usage survey that was completed by more than 1,600 business decision makers across a broad range of companies that have traditionally been reliant upon manual employee processes, such as construction, retail and distribution, manufacturing, transportation and logistics. Their data gives us insight into some of the latest enterprise mobility trends, and further proves that the use of mobile apps in the workplace can yield big benefits for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Here is a look at how businesses are using mobile apps in 2015:

• Organizations using multiple mobile business apps – Two-thirds of respondents indicated their organization used 1-5 mobile business apps in 2014, and a robust 20% of organizations used 10+ mobile business apps last year.
• Organizations are saving money converting manual processes to mobile apps – Of those tracking their cost savings, 17% saved between $25,000-$100,000 annually switching to mobile apps, while 81% indicated cost savings between $1,000-$25,000.
• Mobile apps still used most heavily for inspections and work orders – When it comes to specific tasks businesses are using mobile apps for, inspections (52%), work orders (35%), checklists (20%) and surveys (20%) remain the four most popular – as was the case in last year’s survey.
• Signature capture and image capture are popular features – The 2015 Canvas survey also tracked, for the first time, which mobile business app features organizations have used in the past 12 months. Image capture (56%), signature capture (52%), workflow (23%) and GPS (22%) were most popular.

To learn more, read the full report.