[steakman]

I work for a Global Company with 15,000+ employees. Of those I will give a rough estimate that 4500 are Salespersons. In Canada that figure is easily 100+ persons on the road in primarily sales positions. We service industrial clients. At this time Sr, Management has BBerrys..sales person do not.

The company is always looking for ways to reduce cost and that is one of the reasons used to not supply us with these devices. Having come from another global outfit that did in fact provide said devices, going back to the "stone age" is making sales related activities quite onerous and slow. We are equippped with the cheapest snail phones available - no e-mail, no contact snyc..nadda. One word describes their ability: Useless and to me they keep us noncompetitive simply due to the fact that in this world, you nneed to be able to act and react in minutes...not hours or days.

The plan moving forward, as I have been informed is this:

Begin using a CRM & to equip all sales persons with Rogers USB "rocket sticks" to access the internet such that they can input "fresh" data into the CRM using said laptops. Said laptops are BNIB HP Elitebooks 8440p's..not exactly your garden variety off the shelf units and worth a pretty penny.

Now I dont know about you guys...but I see disaster on the horizon:

Stolen laptops, Compromised security and a total unwillingness on the part of anyone to actually use their laptops in their vehicles to simply input data into a CRM. You have to remove it from its bag, boot it up, enter passwords etc..enter your data, shut it down, restow it and then and only then move on to the next end user...what a pile of collosul foolishness. (in my opinion only of course.!)

Not only that .. does anyone really take their laptop into an idustrial plant ea and every time they make a sales call or do demo's or other hands on sales related activities..? Because to leave it your vehicle would in my mind be completely irresponsible...No?

Yep, total disaster.! But, what the hell do I know.

I would love to hear from all of you BES admins on this and particularly if anyone of you has ever done an actual time/money study on the benefits of going with BES and BB's company wide as opposed to what our braintrust has decided.

Thank you,

stk

[freakinvibe]

stk, I can't present you any studies, but what could be suggested to management is that people could use their private phone for business.

The company could pay them a fixed sum per month (e.g. 50$) which should cover for data/voice costs. Then they could use a new feature called "Blackberry Balance" that separates business and private data on your phone. So business data is encrypted and can be controlled by BES, but the private part (private e-mail, FB, Twitter, Games, other private Apps) are untouched and not controlable by BES.

Our clients mostly have Blackberries and notebooks. Notebooks are much harder to control. Although they have full disk encryption, VPN etc., the support is much more time intensive.

In the end, you probably need a Gartner study to present to your management, but it seems clear to me that Blackberries are much easier to control and support than notebooks.

[steakman]

...but it seems clear to me that Blackberries are much easier to control and support than notebooks...

I couldnt agree more. Overall better, safer and significantly less of an issue if stolen or lost given they can be wiped remotely.

Yea, I have no problem seperating the two...but they can provide the phone and the plan. When you go with 100 units, you're not exactly paying list price or even close to, on a Bold 9780 or similar.. Besides, from my perspective, BB's make a sales person that much more effective in that they can act and react near instantly as opposed to those using 1980's tech. Every edge counts in a competitive world. The company wins on that count with significantly greater productivity...particularly with what we (CRM), are about to embark on.

Ya know, one would think that those companys that are smart enough to realize BB's do exactly that, should have no issue in providing said tech for their people. Staying competitive in todays market is more important than the so called "savings" to be had by not providing..? and if you use it for some pers business, then that is what I call a perk of the job. Now mind you, I never had in the past my personal e-mail set up with a business phone. it never was an issue really so I never pursued it with our IT people at the time.

One thing that I found after initially going with RIM tech was that the # of phone calls dropped significantly, as more and more contacts would prefer to use e-mail and colleagues would use BBM. A trend that continues for sure. I would argue that it may be even cheaper to use than a std cell phone..??

However there will always be some clown that spends more time using the internet and chewin up lots of bandwidth while DL'ing lots of Gbytes...and that can be costly for sure.

my opinion only of course

..BB Balance is a good idea and will suit certain companys without a doubt, but if the primary use of the phone is for business say 90% or greater (and I'm not sure how you would measure that either), then let them provide.! :D

My wife; New Curve..both young adult daughters: 9780's. Me..I still use a good old Bold 9000.! BBM is our preffered method of comm.

Appreciate the comments..thanx.!

Stk

[Frank Castle]

I would discuss with some of your salespeople as it seems no one actually asked them what will work for them. I don't really consider a laptop and USB modem "mobile". That whole setup has to be more expensive then a Blackberry. Bear in mind you could use Blackberry Server Express which is free to run a very quick, cheap pilot with a couple users. You could also use the Blackberry tethered to laptop to reduce the amount of hardware you need to provide your sales staff.

I would also explore the CRM app and if there is a mobile portal. Most of the major ones support Blackberry. You need to focus on the effenciency gains. A sales guy having 2 or 3 quick steps to enter / retrieve data is more productive then having to boot, connect and use a laptop. As you mentioned you also have the cost of encryption for laptops, patching etc.

Put all the #'s into excel and run a pilot both ways. Any company of that size should be willing to spend a little to determine a CBA and the ROI.