Mobilize custom Oracle apps into one Oracle mobile app: here's how

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How to mobilize highly customized apps into one Oracle mobile app? This telco did it for a quarter of the cost of custom development.

A large global provider of satellite broadband and wireless services and technology was looking to increase productivity and streamline business processes to cater to their large mobile workforce. Their dilemma: they needed to mobilize several highly integrated and customized Oracle applications, but quickly and at minimal cost.

The company relies on Oracle’s E-Business Suite (EBS) for employee time tracking and reporting, as well as Oracle’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) applications for tracking their product’s maturation from development to customer deployment. The company needed to bring these systems into the modern mobile era—but how?

The challenge: Modernize & mobilize highly customized apps

Even though the company had a large internal software development team that delivered applications to its external customers, internal apps for employees tended to be lower-priority projects that aimed for low costs and low-IT resource investments. The organization’s ERP applications posed challenging usability issues for their users, and their IT department estimated the cost and time to develop an app that could integrate with these systems would be huge.

Ensuring compliance for the company’s employees was paramount, as they were required to enter their time and projects on a weekly basis in a desktop-only version of Oracle’s E-Business Suite. Entering time logs at the end of week was a complicated chore, and many weekly reports and processes had to be manually created to ensure compliance. Further, their workers had to complete frequent data entry on their projects into Oracle’s Supply Chain Management and Product Lifecycle Management applications, which proved lengthy and cumbersome.

With upgrading the systems being a costly endeavor, the company needed to find an alternative solution. To keep these systems as is would result in increased poor performance of product development, and poor customer support satisfaction, since data that had been inputted in the system was difficult to access in real-time.

The company wanted to optimize the user experience with custom business rules that needed to be layered on top of their Oracle transactions, so that they could be nimble and quickly iterate apps as needed.

Costly, time-consuming options

Needing to modernize their highly customized Oracle systems for desktop-use as well as Android devices, the company considered multiple options:

Packaged Apps from Oracle: Oracle customers have unique challenges when trying to extend their existing systems to users on mobile devices. The Oracle Mobile Platform requires an onerous migration to Oracle Fusion architecture, middleware and applications. These packaged apps can only deliver HTML5 at the device, which has renowned constraints in performance and user experience. Further, if you want to use their portfolio apps, you must modify them at the source code level to reflect the customizations you have made to their back-end applications.
Outsourced IT Services: Hire an outsourced consulting company to modernize their Oracle workflows, which could cost them close to $1 million in services and upwards of 6-12 months to implement.
Build Internally: With such a large in-house IT team, the company considered building the apps themselves. However, their team was only focused on delivering applications to customers, and estimated cost and time were just too high.

PowWow Mobile apps platform can mobilize any apps: Oracle mobile app and more Fortunately, the company found an affordable, quick solution. They chose US-based PowWow Mobile’s SmartUX Platform for its ability to simplify and mobilize applications into a modern native app experience. Apps extended with SmartUX can be used on any device including a desktop computer, tablet, smartphone, or smartwatch.

Leveraging SmartUX, the company quickly and simply modernized and streamlined their multiple Oracle workflows into a unified app. This was accomplished with no APIs and with no changes to their source applications.

Results: Unified Oracle mobile app that improves compliance

With modernized mobilized processes, employees can now access relevant data and workflows, track project statuses and update product defect data from their Android devices. Furthermore, the mobile solution enables their users to track project lifecycles more accurately and efficiently, while providing greater support to their customers.

All told, the service provider delivered a fully-functional native app with PowWow’s SmartUX Platform for a quarter of the estimated cost of custom development. To learn more about SmartUX, check out this quick overview.

SmartUX is a “Best of 2017” winner in MobileVillage’s 16th Annual Mobile Star Awards: