How to Streamline Supply Chain Device Management

Many organizations today have disparate devices in multiple form factors for many uses, a myriad of applications for different tasks, and complex IT infrastructures — all of which are difficult and costly to maintain. These mobile solutions are built on different technology platforms that force companies into siloed provisioning and application support.

It’s a technology minefield that needs fixing.

Honeywell’s Mobility Edge™ delivers an innovative solution to these challenges. Mobility Edge is based upon extensive research gathered from Honeywell’s global community of customers from a range of technologies. Honeywell recognized that businesses wanted a unified hardware and software platform for all form factors — one that allowed for rapid deployments, robust performance and adaptability to changing needs.

We completely rethought our approach to meeting the challenges of supporting a mobile workforce, and Mobility Edge was the answer. This unified, dynamic platform for mobile computing is designed to:

• Accelerate deployments
• Optimize business performance
• Extend lifecycles
• Strengthen security

Mobility Edge offers an integrated, repeatable, scalable approach to device management that is based on a common hardware and software platform. Designed for Android™, it delivers a unified platform on which all software solutions are based. Businesses can develop and deploy faster while reducing development costs.

The Mobility Edge common platform is composed of:

• Common SOM (System On Module), which includes the CPU, memory, WWAN (in selected devices), WLAN, Bluetooth®, near-field communication (NFC) and Zigbee (in selected devices)
• Common operating system image with support for multiple generations of Android, from Android O through Android R
• Common software ecosystem that includes not just Honeywell software, but also Honeywell-approved ISVs (independent software vendors)

Together, these common elements minimize your company’s cost, effort and risk. They accelerate your time-to-value so you can start deploying devices into the hands of your mobile workers much faster. And they maximize your ROI by extending the lifecycle of your devices. By providing a unified hardware and software platform with an agile approach, we can bring you more secure and reliable solutions across your operation.

Accelerate Deployments

According to VDC Research¹, the average cost for IT staff to deploy a single device is $700. In Honeywell’s view, this is unacceptable. We have the solution to slow, labor-intensive implementations: rapid deployment with Mobility Edge.

With the common platform offered by Mobility Edge, you can validate all your mobile devices, use cases and software once, and then deploy them across several devices in multiple form factors — faster, easier, and at lower cost.

For example, if you are a retailer, you may have multiple devices that are optimized for different environments such as the front of the store or a back room, and others for the distribution or fulfillment center. With Mobility Edge, all these devices can be on the same hardware and software core platform. Your one-time investment in setup, deployment and provisioning is reusable across all devices.

Optimize Business Performance

Consider the cost of a single device not being available for use during a shift. What about over the course of a year?

According to IDC², just one instance of device failure or unavailability per shift multiplied across a year can cost you $20,000 in annual support and productivity loss per mobile worker.

With Operational Intelligence, which is included in the Mobility Edge unified platform, Honeywell can help you avoid the high cost of an unavailable device and maximize the value of your device investment.

Operational Intelligence — A vendor-independent asset management solution that helps you track, manage, standardize and optimize all your mobile devices, across all your locations. The platform delivers results that have previously been unattainable:

• Reduce wasteful “no fault found” returns
• Right-size your spare pool inventory
• Right-place your assets
• Consolidate RMA processes into one efficient system
• Verify adherence to RMA vendor contracts

Optimize Business Performance

Shorter device lifecycles cause frustration for IT departments with adverse impacts on productivity, security and ROI.

Mobility Edge is Honeywell’s answer to the need to extend the life of your mobile devices — and get full return on your solution investment. By investing in a new Honeywell device this year, you can benefit from at least six years of useful life, through 2025. Here is how we do it:

Security support through five versions of Android (O to R) — We have collaborated closely with Google on their Android mobile OS, and with Qualcomm® on their mobile device chipset, to provide a guarantee of compatibility and support for Mobility Edge through Android R. This is the longest mobile device lifecycle in the industry.

Strengthen Security

We live in a time where security breaches are a constant threat to business. In 2018, according to IBM³, the average cost of a data breach was $3.8 million — but it can easily be much more than that.

Just a few years ago, one large national U.S. retailer experienced a security breach that exposed the sensitive data of millions of consumers. Their costs in IT, legal, remediation and related expenses exceeded $300 million.

Honeywell has a deep institutional and cultural focus on security across multiple domains. We invest more than $50 million annually in cybersecurity and employ over 300 dedicated security professionals who are focused on protecting our customers.

We design security into our products, policies and processes. The best way to ensure that you have a secure device is to make sure that you are using the most recent version of the operating system and up-to-date security patches. We provide a regular security patch cadence for Mobility Edge devices of at least every 90 days, and often as frequently as every 30 days.

Committed to Platform Longevity

Honeywell is deeply committed to the longevity and quality of the Mobility Edge platform. Last year, we launched the Dolphin™ CT40, Dolphin CT60, Dolphin CN80 and Thor™ VM1A devices, which all run on Mobility Edge.

Thus far in 2019, we have released the Dolphin CK65, and you can expect to see the Mobility Edge family of devices continue to grow year after year.

Sources:
1. VDC Research. New Data Finds Poor Enterprise Mobility Connectivity and Performance Costs Companies $20,000 Per Year, Per Mobile Worker, December 6, 2018.
2. IDC. The Business Value of Optimized Device Deployment, July 2018.
3. McCarthy, Niall. The Average Cost Of A Data Breach Is Highest In The U.S. [Infographic], Forbes, July 13, 2018.