For Companies Both Big and Small: Running a Business on Smartphones
CPS Energy is the largest city owned energy provider in the nation. Attained by San Antonio in 1942, it boasts 717,000 electrical customers and 325,000 natural gas customers in San Antonio and its surrounding areas. Christopher Barron, Chief Information Officer and Vice President of CPS, compared the company’s productivity to the productivity of other major companies (such as UPS and FedEx) and become conscious of an inconsistency in business operations. The Magellan Program was created to address this problem. The main purpose of the Magellan Program was to “better mobilize and connect its workforce to the people and systems they needed to do their jobs.” It provided new smartphones and custom devices to field workers, most of whom didn’t have PC’s, cellular devices or Internet. The company was able to build its own VPN (Virtual Private Network). This enabled employees to have access to SAP (Systems Application Programs), e-mail, voicemail, various multi-media, and other corporate systems and applications. It extended CPS’s networking capabilities and unified a divided workforce. The program also greatly reduced the problem solving process. In the span of a single year, closing purchases and procurement deals decreased in cost by by 65%, and inventory levels were reduced by a whopping 8 million dollars. Furthermore, the program has allowed the company to reduce costs by having staff use their phones as digital cameras which reduced the amount of labor and time. Lloyd’s Construction Services, a small family owned business, has provided demolition services throughout Minnesota for 24 years. The company has only 100 employees, 30 trucks, and around 400 dumpsters. Before the switch over to the technological age, the company depended on archaic measures for accounting and communicating purposes. Lloyd’s systems were riddled with ineffectiveness. Every morning, Lloyd’s dispatchers reviewed customer...