Scaling Your Enterprise Mobility Program Across Borders Smartly and Efficiently

It’s a new year and your mobility program looks good. The right balance of internal management and external partnerships have delivered on employee satisfaction, competitiveness, and all within fiscal expectations. This is not, in fact, an unrealistic situation for many organizations with mature mobility programs. However, if we zoom out, the picture is not normally so sanguine when looking across national borders. This is true even for organizations that don’t consider themselves international enterprises and simply work across the northern border to Canada. In 2020 your organization needs a new partner; TRG Global. 

First, the why:

Many strategic mobile application initiatives stall at the border, as if there were a dark ages sign reading “here be dragons.” Corporations, though, still need to thrive in a competitive market that may feel like a world of dragons as cultures, regulations, and languages shift with surprising quickness. For more than a decade, organizations large and small have turned to telecom expense management companies (TEMs) to gain control of their global mobile operator spend and gain efficiencies across borders with largely positive results. See for instance #CALERO #MDSL #NEXTEM.

That decade, however, has passed. It was largely the decade of email and CRM on mobile devices for white-collar employees with trendy job titles, like digital nomads, and fuzzy ROIs at best. Smartphones were subsidized, mobile applications were extensions of browser or desktop enterprise software, and mobile operator expenses for voice and data plus additional fees (such as roaming) were a disproportionate amount of the mobility “spend.”  Certainly, exceptions abound, especially in warehouse and supply chain operations, but that presages the mass migration from the WinCE ecosystem to Android as well as the merging of the enterprise support ecosystem. 

Today, with the deployment of mobile applications as business tools (e.g. Amazon PrimeNow, inflight payments, hospitality guest room attendants, bedside care, home healthcare, retail concierge, rental car checkin, etc.) proliferating on both consumer devices (#Apple #Samsung) and purpose-built devices (#SocialMobile #DataLogic #Honeywell) the proverbial toolbelt is now digital. The mobile device is a tool with one or more enterprise applications. These tools are not for employee downtime that may span Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and online shopping. Their use, rather, is restricted through sophisticated unified end point management (UEM) and point solution systems. #CORATTA

In today’s world the cost of smartphones or tablets easily eclipses the $1000/€900 threshold, they increasingly are sourced from traditional channels versus the mobile operator, and have a longer upgrade cycle (an iPhone 6S still runs iOS13). In addition, they require mission critical support (email and CRM never were mission critical for the 99%) as well as a strong maintenance system. It is not practical nor sustainable to throw devices away and replace them with “free” subsidized devices anymore when the inevitability of life happens. It is a question of when life happens, not if; broken screens, loss/theft, catastrophic damage, wear and tear, failing batteries, and more. Combine that with a complex ecosystem of hardware and peripherals (#Otterbox #UniVerseSystem #IPCMobile #PROGLOVE etc), deployed across national borders, and now a robust managed asset partner is required, lest the program drown in bespoke fragmented processes and vendors.

All of the above taken together with an in-depth knowledge of each market, including local partners and vendors, and the enterprise is poised for success. In real-life, though, programs suffer from multiple harsh realities; lack of global market knowledge at a central location, vendor fragmentation of geographies, managerial purview, internal transfer of payment processes, multiple currencies, and skyrocketing costs through duplication and inefficiency. Any number of these factors work against the enterprise manager, necessitating solid partnerships.

There are 195 countries in the world (give or take).

If anybody ever tells you in a meeting that they do global everywhere that meeting should be stopped on the spot. Having worked with multi-nationals to deploy and support mobile devices across five of the six continents, I can tell you for a fact: nobody covers all 195. This includes dozens of managed service providers and the largest global system integrators and consulting firms. Not even close. Full stop.

That said, most deployments represent a concentration of devices in key geographies, primarily in the European Union and the United States. This is not to minimize LATAM, MEA, India, China, or south east Asia. This is simply supported by empirical data. There are of course exceptions such as Chinese or Indian corporations deploying at scale in their respective home markets. Japan is another notable market that requires its own solutions.

It is for these reasons that TRG located its TRG Global headquarters outside of Amsterdam, Netherlands, a country which is a member of the European Union customs bloc.

Politics, Customs, OEMs, and the Multi-National Structure

On the one hand the world is an interconnected economy with goods flowing relatively friction free between countries. It may seem like multi-national business is under assault from many different directions. The barrier to the free flow of goods and services is increasing and complicated both by politics but also by the corporations themselves. Corporate structures have a legacy of mobility being centralized at the country level for management, regulatory, financial, and cultural reasons. This creates a managerial impediment to global scale both through local pushback but also a senior executive mentality of “why should I care” and or lack of sponsorship. One major global OEM went so far as to launch an RFP and subsequent pilot for global TEM without executive sponsorship. Imagine the vendor’s surprise when they learned it would be a country by country opt-in process versus a global rollout. The internal team didn’t have global decision-making authority and the omission of executive sponsorship went undiscovered for too long.

Customs unions (blocs) strive to eliminate internal barriers to the movement of goods by creating a single regulatory regime for goods entering the customs union. The most important example is the European Union, which covers 28 countries plus four additional bilateral countries including Turkey. In theory, a single operation inside of the European Union can achieve similar results as to a single operation in the United States. In practice, the EU is still hamstrung by multiple currencies (11) plus the Turkish Lira. When the United Kingdom exits that will fall to 10 currencies. The presence of multiple currencies, even if there were only the USD and Euro, introduces currency exchange risk and overhead into the financial flows and local apportionment of costs. TRG’s ability to natively invoice in Euros and US Dollars, as well as additional currencies, eliminates one long term financial risk for the enterprise. 

While the EU is a customs union, many of the distribution agreements for the OEMs pre-date the EU and the single currency. This means that rarely is purchasing in the EU a single transaction activity. This is complicated by country by country mobile operator licensing as well as OEM authorizations for resale and individual SKU practices on a country by country basis. Add to that, historically OEMs have had different warranty terms and/or requirements based on individual countries. Granted the EU has a 24-month mandatory warranty period, but there are still local restrictions and/or caveats. Don’t forget there is the power plug issue between the UK and most of Europe, let alone across the other regions; small but oh-so important. TRG’s Amsterdam location within the EU provides our clients with a stable platform for their EU operations during the Brexit uncertainty and on to the future.

The risk of politics to the enterprise and cross border trade should be self-evident today. The risk at the individual country level is greatly mitigated when there are structural protections like a customs union. 

There is no intention of omission regarding the MERCOSUR customs union in South America. For the bulk of North American and European Union domiciled multi-nationals, LATAM does not represent a material portion of their mobile fleet and therefore the operational and financial burden is either minimal or too dispersed. 

Regulatory requirements in India and China largely require local in-country operations, which TRG provides to our clients through our global partner network. This is true, too, of much of the Middle East, Africa, and South East Asia. 

Mobile Operators

The telecommunications expense management (TEM) companies have done an excellent job of optimizing the spend, across countries and mobile operators, in the major markets for enterprise customers. Their ability to execute is directly proportional to the country by country mobile population served. For instance, the benefits of optimizing and managing the expenses of 10 mobile devices in Poland or Czech Republic doesn’t outweigh the cost of the program, versus doing the same for 1000 devices in Italy. 

The mobile operators historically have provided procurement and support services in many countries and/or partnered with device distributors. This has been done on a country by country basis versus a single, EU-wide service mandate. Imagine 50 Verizon contracts versus one in the US? This is a direct result of legacy legal structures that hold the operating companies of the mobile carriers under the regulatory structure of the individual countries. Vodafone, Orange, and Telefonica in Europe created enterprise organizations to synthesize a pan-European mobile operator through VGE, OBS, and TBS respectively. These organizations work well for the larger multi-nationals but require a significant commitment that limited regional flexibility for the enterprise mobility customer. TRG’s procurement, deployment, and depot managed logistics (repair and maintenance for multiple manufacturers/brands) provides a European, US, and Canadian single source program with efficiencies and scale. There is no excuse for backhauling devices from the EU to the US for repair/replacement or vice versa, let alone the inherent costs and risks of doing so. Make no mistake, these poor practices and habits are more prevalent than one would think within Fortune 500 companies. Often these poor practices go unnoticed through the lack of scrutiny internally or buried in vendor process. 

Enterprise mobile applications and line of business tools are permeating the enterprise and are being deployed across markets. In order to scale efficiently, senior management must alter the paradigm of how mobility is managed and take a look holistically at their global footprint. Nobody “does” enterprise mobility across 195 countries. Nonetheless, the combined USA/Canada/EU footprint of TRG represents $40+ trillion of economic activity and the immediate opportunity for enterprises to optimize and scale their mobility initiatives. Once these regions are optimized, the long tail of the enterprise fleet (fragmented and consisting of minimal concentrations of devices) can be assessed and optimized on an opportunistic basis. Many organizations provide pieces to the most critical element of maintenance and support but only TRG provides a managed asset partnership along with procurement and lifecycle support services.

More to come on global and regional enterprise mobility services, best practices, and hard lessons learned.