Dear PROFIT,

Ah mobile applications, how can I count the ways that they can increase profitability. First, you must realize that not all apps built for mobile phones include simulating fart sounds and making your friends look really fat or skinny through filters. There are actual apps that are designed for companies and corporations that can immensely help productivity, and profitability.

To help answer this question, I reached out to John Rainey, one of our business developers who has a lot of history and knowledge of increasing productivity through mobile apps, especially in the warehouse and mobility space.

“There is a lot of room for most businesses and organizations to increase profitability through a mobile application,” says John. “Take for example delivery drivers. Some, even today, use paper maps and a simple list of addresses that they need to deliver to. It’s up to individual drivers to figure out the best possible routes, relying on their knowledge of their delivery area, traffic, their customer’s hours, and what needs to be delivered when in order to make deliveries. Now, imagine the driver as a smartphone with integrated GPS, a list of his delivery stops that organizes them in a pre-calculated route that can take into account distance, traffic, when customers need their deliveries and can be automatically be readjusted from a centralized office to account for any errors or changes. I would say that the productivity of your driver just increased, most likely allowing you to give your drivers more of a chance to interact with your customers, make more stops in the day, and save on fuel costs, all through the use of an internal route accounting application.”

Also, just think about Square, the nifty little device (which is free) that gives anyone the ability to accept credit cards with very little set-up. Now someone making jewelry out of their home can go to a flea market and sell them, charging more than they might be able to for their work because of the convenience of accepting credit cards over just cash.

Mobile applications can give your workers, employees, and customers instant access to information, allow them to enter in information directly to your system, and then avoid having to enter information in manually, which often results in delays and errors.