Mañana Mañana no more…

Last week I was on the tube travelling home from an account management meeting with one of our Zetadocs for NAV resellers and I saw a disheveled City AM newspaper on the seat next to me. Casually flicking through, I was drawn to an article discussing the establishment of holiday and spa resorts designed to be smartphone and email free ‘detox centers’. This got me thinking about how the modern day workforce goes about their day to day business.

For a while now it has been the norm for people to wish, and moreover expect, to stay connected to emails wherever they are – whether travelling, on holiday or working from home. And since the rise of the smartphone and more recently the tablet, powered by 3G or 4G connectivity, this appetite for being ‘online’ has increased. With Wi-Fi zones now common in hotel rooms, on trains and at airport departure lounges, business productivity has increased dramatically. Previously common ‘down time’ experienced whilst travelling is now very much a thing of the past as we look to squeeze the most out of our hours in transit.

The mobile office is the future. It is clear that Microsoft recognizes this emerging trend by their development of technologies like Microsoft Lync to offer heightened levels of communication between, and within, organizations. The recent acquisition of Skype has allowed Microsoft to provide integration within Dynamics NAV to empower the workforce even further. This appetite to go beyond emails is realized with the addition of the Web Client and SharePoint client for Dynamics NAV 2013. Such alternatives to the traditional (!) Windows Client allow sales reps who may be on the road to access their core ERP solutions to immediately create sales orders for example. Therefore avoiding having to wait until they have returned to the office.

I believe this connectivity to be a tremendously empowering factor to the modern workforce and with this in mind we developed our Zetadocs Payables Approval solution, built upon Windows Azure, which includes a modern browser based interface for users to approve purchase documents whenever and wherever they are.

I believe the ability to approve documents outside of NAV (saving the need for costly light user licenses) is well aligned with the mobile workforce’s increasing desire to be more productive. Approvals can be approved, rejected or delegated whilst the budget holder is out of the office as all users have access to the supporting documentation on their mobile device via the internet.

Long gone are the days of accounts payables clerks being forced to wait for approvers to return to the office after lengthy holidays or business trips. Bottlenecks caused by a lack of visibility of where documents are in the approvals process are now a thing of the past. A little like sending invoices or statements to customer via the post!