August 2008: A Note from Jeff Mack
The Bottom Line: Cutting Down Your Driving Costs - But Not Your Productivity

Have you had the experience of pulling in for gas and spending $100 only to discover that it didn’t even fill the tank? I just did and it was not an experience I want to repeat any time soon. We are in a business that traditionally requires us to spend a good deal of time driving from one client site to another. Many of you likewise are in transportation-dependent industries. The pain of fueling our vehicles is very real. The question is, what can we do to bring some relief to the situation?

Alternative Commuting
If you are simply using a vehicle for commuting back and forth to the workplace, perhaps a bicycle, car pool or public transportation might be a reasonable alternative. For myself, schedule and weather permitting, I bike to the office 2 to 3 times per week. It would be a great byproduct if the 26 mile commute retarded the rapid growth of the waistline, but so far that is much more hope than reality – and perhaps another article for another time.

If your workforce is anything like ours, you may find that they are getting more and more creative in devising reasons why they need to work from home and ways in which they can do so. This might be a great thing for all concerned if proper thought and preparation are applied in good measure.

As the number of mobile or remote workers increases, their impact on the bottom line increases. This column is all about the bottom line so the question is, how can we ensure that the impact is positive?

Out of the Office - But Very Much In Touch
For starters, we want to make sure that our remote/mobile workers are as effective as they can possibly be while out in the field. That means that they need to be empowered with the same capabilities as our office workers. To do that, we want to provide them a single inbox where they can check all their messages, including voicemails, emails, faxes, IM conversations, calendar events and task assignments - essentially one powerful visible command center at their disposal.

Next, we want to ensure that our remote/mobile workers have all the necessary productivity tools at their disposal to access their important files, proposals and delivery acknowledgements regardless of where they are physically located. Whether those files are Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, or even SharePoint documents, the road warrior needs easy access to them.

You may think that doing all of this is impossible, or at least impossibly complicated. It’s really not. Although you may find it easier to start with a little help at the beginning, most of it is pretty straight forward with the right combinations of software and, of course, your preferred piece of hardware.

The hardware can take the form of a laptop, a Smartphone, or any number of handheld PDA devices sold by most of the wireless carriers. You are likely going to need one or more of those devices whether you are on the move or not, so it may not even represent an additional expense to go mobile.

Keeping Your Co-Workers Almost Next Door
Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile is a piece of software that replicates much of the PC experience on a PDA or Smartphone. Using this tool, your remote workers can feel almost as if they are at their office desks. Through the use of Microsoft Office Communications Server, the “presence” of your coworkers can be tracked to provide you real-time availability so you know what the best communication option (phone, email, or IM) is at that moment. Since you can’t walk down the hall or peer over the cubicle wall to talk to them, it’s the next best thing.

Meeting Almost Face-to-Face
At other times, perhaps you want to avoid the car and the road altogether. Maybe a 15 minute video conference with your client would be more convenient for all parties. In that case, you could simply be conducting an IM chat with a client and in the middle of your conversation decide to activate a video conference feature. This is easy drag and drop type stuff that can be deployed and operated on the fly regardless of where your employees are located. By doing so, you can have a productive meeting that is almost as good as being face to face with your client. And in the process, you were able to eliminate the wasted time behind the wheel and the $100 bills going out the exhaust pipe.

Making It Work
Deploying most of these technologies is going to require a little technical savvy - but the easiest approach is to start with what you already have, such as Microsoft Office, and move on from there. If you feel like trying a few steps on your own, here are two good places to start:

• If you use Microsoft Office and want to take this capability with you when you are on the move, Microsoft provides a good starting point for Windows mobile phones and applications.
• MIcrosoft also provides links to many useful application downloads that are relatively easy to deploy on mobile devices, some of which, such as Live Search, are quite powerful.

Moving beyond the basic level to applications such as Microsoft Office Communications Server is more complicated, though the results are also commensurately greater. Our team at ICS Support is available any time to provide advice on selecting the right technologies and how to implement them in your company and with your own remote/mobile workers; just give us a call to get started.

Hopefully I have expanded the realm of possibilities that you might consider in the battle against skyrocketing transportation costs, first by making sure your remote/mobile employees are as effective and productive as possible, and then by identifying ways to still get the job done while leaving the car parked. So there you have it – two ways to positively impact the bottom line.