INSERT COMPANY LOGO HERE
2013 North American SSL Certificate
Product Leadership Award
New Product Innovation Leadership Aw ard
Mobile Workforce Management
North America, 201 4
Frost & Sullivan’s Global Research Platform
Frost & Sullivan is in its 50th year in business with a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies. The company’s research philosophy originates with the CEO’s 360-Degree Perspective™, which serves as the foundation of its TEAM Research™ methodology. This unique approach enables us to determine how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership. Based on the findings of this Best Practices research, Frost & Sullivan is proud to present the 2014 North American New Product Innovation Leadership Award in Mobile Workforce Management to ClickSoftware.
Significance of the New Product Innovation Leadership Aw ard
K ey Industry Chal l en ges Ad dressed by S up eri or Mobi l e Sol uti on s
North American mobile workforce management (MWM) applications are designed to track and manage mobile field workers and optimize and automate their tasks. This expanding market is being driven by a number of significant factors; however, Frost & Sullivan notes that it also continues to face key challenges. Current barriers to growth include: 1) A still-fragmented marketplace, 2) Implementation cost and return-on-investment (ROI) concerns on the part of the prospective customer, and 3) Worries regarding ease of use and worker resistance. Frost & Sullivan feels that a top-tier product innovation strategy will help providers address all three of these challenges.
The annual Frost & Sullivan Mobile Enterprise Applications Survey reveals pronounced and continued concerns regarding the cost of mobile workforce management solutions. Interested prospects cite the following as major barriers to purchase: overall cost of implementation, cost of the hardware devices, and the expense of any required software customization. As a result of these concerns, prospects also believe that the ROI for mobile workforce management solutions remains unclear. In response, a leading product innovator will create solutions that provide a quick, hard-dollar return on investment – whether by decreasing expense, increasing employee productivity and efficiency, and/or enhancing customer revenues.
Another challenge relates directly to the individual mobile field worker. If the individual employee finds the MWM application difficult to use, then complications will arise with implementation and morale. This, in turn, can directly impact revenues and profitability. An innovation leader must constantly strive to simplify and optimize its solutions’ user interfaces, work flow processes, etc.
K ey B enchmarki ng C ri t eri a f or New P roduct Innov at i on Leade rshi p Aw ard
For the New Product Innovation Leadership Award, the following criteria were used to benchmark ClickSoftware’s performance against key competitors:
• Innovative Element of the Product
• Leverage of Leading-Edge Technologies in Product • Value Added Features/Benefits
• Increased Customer ROI
• Customer Acquisition/Penetration Potential
Decision Support Matrix and Measurement Criteria
Chart 1: Performance-Based Ratings for Decision Support Matrix
This exercise encompasses all criteria, leading to a weighted average ranking of each company. Researchers can then easily identify the company with the highest ranking. As a final step, the research team confirms the veracity of the model by ensuring that small changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the overall relative rankings of the companies.
Chart 2: Frost & Sullivan’s 10-Step Process for Identifying Award Recipients
Best Practice Aw ard Analysis for ClickSoftw are
Chart 3: Decision Support Matrix for New Product Innovation Leadership Award
Measurement of 1–10 (1 = lowest; 10 = highest) Award Criteria
In n o va ti ve E lem en t of t h e Pr o d u ct Lev er ag e of L eadi n g -E d g e T ech n o lo g ie s in P ro d u ct Val u e A d d ed Feat u re s/ Ben ef it s In cr ease d C u st o m er R O I C u st o me r Ac q u isi ti o n /P en et ra ti o n Po ten ti al W e ig h te d R a tin g Relative Weight (%) 20% 20% 20% 20% 20% 100% ClickSoftware 10 10 10 10 9 9.8 Competitor 1 8 8 8 8 7 7.8 Competitor 2 5 5 6 8 7 6.2
Criterion 1: Innovative Element of the Product
ClickButler from ClickSoftware is a software service on the company’s ClickPlatform, and while it is extendable to any of ClickSoftware’s products, it is a particularly unique capability when applied as a mobile assistant to service workers out in the field.
ClickButler is a context-aware intelligent assistant that will anticipate the need for the worker to perform a certain function, present specific recommendations in that regard on the mobile device, and then carry out the actions for the mobile field worker. A simple example would be ClickButler recommending implementing “the next best action” after a repair call has been completed. It would ask, “Can I call the next customer for you?” and, upon receiving an affirmative response from the worker, would then automatically pull up the customer list, identify the next service appointment, find the contact information, and make the phone call to that customer. This activity would normally require numerous swiping, clicking and typing actions on the worker’s part – yet Frost & Sullivan appreciates the fact that all of these actions are nicely streamlined and performed by the ClickButler service instead. This is truly an innovative and unique service that enables a giant leap in mobile workforce management capabilities by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques.
solutions. Competitor 2, while a key leader in the MWM segment, offers nothing remotely approaching ClickSoftware’s AI-based capability.
Criterion 2: Leverage of Leading-Edge Technologies in Product
An intelligent mobile assistant like ClickButler leverages mobility software technology, location technology, artificial intelligence, and context-aware computing to anticipate what the field worker needs - and then automatically address that need. Frost & Sullivan notes that context awareness in a business setting encompasses a broad range of variables. For a field service worker, these would include the type of job, any SLA commitments in place with the customer, job priority or urgency, the next task, proximity to parts and peers, etc. ClickSoftware is admirably identifying and capturing all of these data and using them to enable artificial intelligence, which quickly and correctly processes the data in order to implement the correct actions and adjustments for the field worker.
Competitor 1 is also incorporating various data to produce high-quality algorithms to predict tech arrival times; however, again, this is a limited app when benchmarked against ClickButler – and the mobile component still needs work. Competitor 2 utilizes mobile and location technology in its MWM products, but has yet to incorporate AI and context-aware computing.
Criterion 3: Value Added Features/Benefits
Under normal circumstances, a mobile workforce management solution requires the field worker to go through a number of motions and steps in order to accomplish a task based on his or her advice. And smartphones are not the most user-friendly form factor for this kind of ongoing activity. The worker must swipe, click, type, and sometimes copy and paste in order to complete wireless forms, meet compliance regulations, understand where and how to accomplish their next job, etc. ClickButler can eliminate the bulk of these repetitive motions and the time it takes to do them – allowing each worker to be more efficient and productive.
These capabilities also increase worker safety by eliminating the temptation to perform tasks on the device while driving. Company liability can be decreased in other ways by building automatic safety warnings into the ClickButler service – such as checking wind speed before climbing onto a roof or proactively warning about a dangerous neighborhood. Neither Competitors 1 nor 2 currently offer this level of productivity and safety benefits.
Criterion 4: Increased Customer ROI
easily be missed or by alerting to the need for a certain part or piece of information. This optimizes time to first fix and reduces the need for costly return calls.
In addition to decreasing expense, ClickButler can increase revenues by alerting the worker to upsell opportunities while on the customer site… or simply just by enhancing customer satisfaction with efficient, timely service.
Criterion 5: Customer Acquisition/Penetration Potential
ClickSoftware already has over 250 enterprise clients, with more than half a million workers using its Service Optimization software. This comprises a vast base of businesses to be mobilized – and services such as ClickButler offer a strong incentive to push ClickSoftware capabilities onto mobile devices in the field.
Once chosen, ClickSoftware has made it simple for customers to find, download, and configure the ClickButler service. The company maintains its ClickAppStore and includes ClickButler as part of its ready-to-use Personal Productivity Pack to run on ClickMobile Touch. IT personnel can drag and drop the service, and no coding is required.
Competitors 1 and 2 also have sizeable embedded bases. Competitor 1’s advantage is similar to ClickSoftware’s, in that there is a large segment of its current customers that can be sold on mobilizing capabilities; however, the Competitor 1 current customer base is significantly smaller than ClickSoftware’s. Competitor 2 is a mobile-centric application developer and is focused on selling to the mid-market, so its level of potential sales revenue is considerably lower.
Conclusion
Critical Importance of TEAM Research
Frost & Sullivan’s TEAM Research methodology represents the analytical rigor of our research process. It offers a 360-degree view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all seven of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Our experience has shown over the years that companies too often make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, leading to errors of both omission and commission. Frost & Sullivan contends that successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. In that vein, the letters T, E, A and M reflect our core technical, economic, applied (financial and best practices) and market analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the TEAM Research methodology provides an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry players and for creating high-potential growth strategies for our clients.
Chart 4: Benchmarking Performance with TEAM Research
