thebhwgroup.com

What Is Business Process Consulting?

Paul Francis — 2015-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Business process consulting is a specialized field that focuses on helping companies analyze, streamline, and transform the way they do business. The goals are to cut costs, increase profits, and provide a better experience for both staff and customers. Depending on the nature of your business and the processes you currently employ, business process consulting might result in simple fine-tuning or a radical overhaul of how your company currently conducts business. Here is a look at some of the common recommendations. {% include full-blog-image.html src="football_play.jpg" alt="football play chalk on grass - business process methaphor" %} ##Front Office Transformation Since the dawn of the information age, technology has been considered a key support for traditional business strategies. Today, however, this is not enough. Information and interactivity no longer play a supporting role to other strategies—they have become core strategies in their own right. Taking your place as a 21st century business means entirely transforming your front office to meet changing expectations. Front office transformation involves two key components, both designed to offer value to you as well as your customers. **Digital Front Office**: A digital front office is a broad reimagining of how you interact with consumers. Today, customers expect to conduct business online at their convenience rather than visiting a physical storefront during regular operating hours. Switching wholly or partly to digital front office operations provides unprecedented opportunities to interact, engage, and ultimately retain customers. We will show you how to add real value, ultimately improving your own bottom line. **Globally Integrated Enterprise**:This refers to the internal business operations that must be reinvented to support your digital front office. In today’s highly competitive Internet marketplace, the most successful companies are fully integrated, lean, and highly agile. We will show you how to prepare to meet changing market factors and customer demands without losing your focus or company vision. ##Key Process Redesign Successfully transforming your business into a streamlined operation capable of meeting new challenges and opportunities often involves a complete redesign of some of your key processes. Old ways of doing business do not always fit today’s needs, but it can be tough for company owners to figure out what to change. **Strategic Planning**: We will gather a great deal of information about your company’s current infrastructure, operations, and target goals, and then use sophisticated planning and projection software to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current processes. We will explain our results and suggestions to you and work together to develop a strategic plan. **Streamlining:** Our goal is to help your company transform into a leaner, more agile business model that allows you to work smarter, not harder. We will show you how to remove redundant reporting, cut through red tape, and integrate your business processes in ways that support this goal. Every step of the way, we will incorporate technology as appropriate. This helps free up your employees to do what they do best while ensuring that you have access to the latest in analytics, data streams, and other vital 21st century tools. **Outsourcing:** One topic that even seasoned business owners often struggle with is when, where, and how to outsource. Your company is your baby, and it is only natural to want to maintain control over every aspect of its growth and development. However, for most businesses, there comes a time when outsourcing makes sense. ##Business Process Management For jobs that require highly specialized knowledge that no one on your team has, outsourcing allows you to draw on the power of experts in that particular area. Likewise, some jobs require little specialized knowledge of exactly what your company does. Outsourcing those projects allows you to funnel your human resources into the jobs for which they are most vital. **Real-Time Adjustment:** One of the key components in responsible business process consulting is helping the client adjust new processes as needed to account for real-world factors. The sophisticated solutions we use allow you to monitor and adjust your processes as needed in real time, and see the results right away. Being able to respond to changing market factors as they occur will help you ensure that your business is ready to weather any storm.

Do you need an expert in business process consulting or business process management? With a team of specialists covering a wide range of skill sets and backgrounds, The BHW Group is prepared to help your company make the transformations needed to remain competitive in today’s high-tech marketplace.

Top 5 Ways to Use Mobile Applications to Grow Your Business

Paul Francis — 2014-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Mobile applications have exploded in popularity as consumers grow more and more attached to their smart phones. To the customer, a smart phone acts as a sort of one-stop shop where he or she can do anything from booking a table at a restaurant to buying tickets to the hottest show in town. For the business owner, mobile apps provide nearly unprecedented opportunities to engage the customer and provide personalized service. From major corporations to small mom and pops, companies have begun to embrace the mobile app phenomenon. Here are the top 5 ways your company can grow with the help of mobile applications. {% include full-blog-image.html src="BHW_Mobile_application.jpg" alt="Grow Through Mobile Apps" %} ##1. Communication Mobile apps make it easy to network your employees, managers, and customers in a real time feedback loop. If your employees travel or work in the field, they can easily log into an app that gives them important updates from the home office, allows them to pose questions to their supervisor or colleagues, and even collaborate on reports. Likewise, your customers can use a mobile app to find out if you have a product in stock, ask questions of your sales staff, or provide instant feedback and reviews. ##2. Branding A mobile app takes the experience of digitally interacting with your business from the website to your customers’ digital devices. Rather than having to remember to log in, your clients will see your logo whenever they scroll through their apps. Just putting your company in front of them on a regular basis can increase sales and improve brand loyalty. Providing high quality, useful content further enhances your brand and makes customers more likely to open your app on a regular basis. ##3. Customer Experience Many mobile apps are designed to help customers quickly solve a problem or gain information. For example, food giant Kraft offers an app that helps customers put together a quick meal. Depending on your line of business, you might highlight your spring collection, let customers try different hairstyles on their own uploaded photo, or allow them to store their credit card information for easy ticket purchases. Mobile apps can also provide easy access to important facts about your company. You can put your operating hours, locations, contact information, and current specials or promotions at your customers’ fingertips, saving them a phone call or web search. In addition, many mobile apps provide a place for potential customers to request more information or set up an appointment—which is particularly valuable if you don’t have someone answering your phone 24 hours per day. ##4. Marketing Mobile apps are easy to integrate with social media, allowing your existing customers to help spread the word about your business. No matter how good your current marketing scheme is, it’s tough to beat the value of word of mouth. In addition, you can use push notifications to let your customers know of upcoming events, sales, and other important information. In turn, your most loyal followers will tell their friends about these events, encouraging them to sign up and further building your brand. ##5. Exclusive, Customized Offers Mobile apps give you access to a wealth of data about your consumers, from what products they shop for to where they are physically located at any given time. This allows you to customize their experience and target specific discounts to the customers who are most likely to use them. In addition, people like to feel like they are part of something exclusive. Offering unadvertised specials and sales events only to those who have the app builds excitement and brand loyalty, and encourages new customers to sign up. To make the most of your mobile app, keep it fresh and updated. Customers thrive on new content, including insider tips, discounts, and helpful information. They also like contests, trivia, and other special activities. Give your customers a reason to keep opening the app, and you will go a long way toward building loyalty and valuable word of mouth.

Do you need an expert in mobile app development? With a team of specialists covering a wide range of skill sets and backgrounds, The BHW Group is prepared to bring your vision to life.

Austin Mobile Apps That You Wish Existed...But Don't

Brett Burnett — 2014-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Today it’s easy to assume there is a mobile app or website for anything you need. Businesses are compelled to represent their brand, products, and services in the mobile space in order to keep up with competition, maintain market share, and attract new customers. Increasingly there are stiff penalties for ignoring your mobile presence with your customers and prospects. One of our clients recently asked us to refresh their legacy website after analysis from Google Analytics showed revenue was down $50,000 per month due to their website’s poor mobile conversion rate. Customers could find products and services through organic search, but our client’s legacy website was not optimized for mobile, so their customers were unable to navigate the site properly to convert into sales. Stories like these are becoming more common. In 2013 a [paradigm shift](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white_paper_c11-520862.html) occurred for companies and their mobile strategy. For the first time ever mobile devices surpassed desktop PCs in total internet usage in the United States. If you haven’t optimized for mobile, this is troubling news, but there’s even more urgency than you might imagine. In 2013 Desktop PCs had their worst sales decline in history. Further, CNN, Pew, and other researchers now show that in Q1 2014, internet usage by mobile apps alone surpassed desktop PC usage in the US. This is a staggering find, mobile apps by themselves account for more internet traffic than all of the desktop PCs in the United States. Mobile apps now represent 86% of mobile internet traffic, and when you include mobile web browsing, mobile represents 55% of all internet traffic. The App Store has been very successful popularizing the expression, “There’s an app for that.” Having lived in Austin over 20 years I can tell you that there are plenty of gaps when it comes to our city. I often find myself wishing for an app to make my life in Austin easier. We asked around to family and friends of BHW and came up with a top five list of mobile apps we wished we had. Here’s our top five list of Austin mobile apps we wish existed, but don’t… ##1. Franklin BBQ {% include full-blog-image.html src="franklins.jpg" alt="Austin App Idea - Franklin's" %} Austin’s biggest name in BBQ is [Franklin’s](https://franklinbarbecue.com). After countless awards, accolades, press and TV appearances everyone knows Franklin’s. No other restaurant in town has their name, and no other restaurant has their line! Franklin’s line is so famous that it has its own twitter account [@FranklinBBQline](https://twitter.com/franklinbbqline). Franklin’s started posting pictures each morning showing how long their line is for lunch. The pictures, witty messages, and, social media outreach are a powerful example of a great social media strategy. Franklin’s has done more than most to engage their mobile audience, but our topic is mobile apps we wish existed. What if we took Franklin’s line and applied some predictive business intelligence to anticipate demand, created a process to monitor line length in real-time, and coupled that with Google maps? How about a mobile app that can tell you the expected wait time for lunch and even factors in your drive time to get there? What if we went one step further and could sign up for mobile push notifications if the line were ever uncharacteristically short? Franklin’s is in the enviable position of selling out their products everyday, but what if they had seasonal specials like whole Turkeys for Thanksgiving or Christmas? Push notifications of seasonal specials would allow Franklin’s to advertise effectively to a ravenous customer base. Research shows that push notifications are five times more likely to be read than mass email and can have higher than a 60% click through rate. If you want to reach your customers, push notifications are one of the best tools for the job. ##2. Downtown Parking {% include full-blog-image.html src="dyc-parking.jpg" alt="Austin App idea - parking" caption="photo by Deborah Canon, Statesman.com"%} Let’s solve a frustrating problem that everyone in Austin experiences. With Austin’s incredible growth comes traffic, construction, and parking problems. If you park downtown you know that the options have dwindled and new garages can’t be built fast enough. There are a few mobile apps out there that try to help with parking, but most concentrate on listing surface lots or garages. In 2012 the city [signed a deal](http://www.wired.com/2012/06/austin-gets-a-smart-parking-app) to share its smart meter data with a mobile app company, but this deal hasn’t produced any results so far. The new trend on parking apps seems to be pre-selling spots from affiliated lots and garages at a premium for the convenience. Wouldn’t it be great if we could share the city’s smart meter data in real-time to a mobile app? Imagine driving down the street with geolocation pinpointing nearby spots that are open or will expire soon. What if we went a step further and used business intelligence to show our users historical trends for when spots start to fill during the day? This information would allow users to better plan when to travel or arrive at a destination. What if we shared the length of time people are spend looking for spots in real-time? Users sharing real-time data about current conditions is an exciting concept, and features like this build strong communities, foster mobile app engagement, and create extremely valuable social media connections with your users. Consider applications like [Waze](https://www.waze.com) which crowd-sources current road conditions from drivers. Waze entered late into a crowded GPS market full of apps from established vendors like Garmin and TomTom, but Waze was unique with a crowd-sourced data vision which became extremely popular. Ultimately others took note but not before Waze was purchased by Google for $996 million dollars in 2013. The possibilities are endless. Imagine integrating to the city’s smart meter system in real-time so that you could receive push notifications of spots nearby and reminders on your spot’s expiration. What if we integrated with online payments to allow users to extend the time on their spot from their phone, without visiting the meter again? I wish there was “an app for that.” ##Conclusion Join us next in our next segment as we share our final three mobile apps we wish existed, but don’t…

Do you need an expert in mobile app development? With a team of mobile app development specialists covering a wide range of skill sets and backgrounds, The BHW Group is prepared to help your company make the transformations needed to remain competitive in today’s high-tech marketplace.

Mobile App Development - Complete Approach

Paul Francis — 2014-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

##Mobile App Development In my previous 2 articles, I provided an overview of both mobile websites and native mobile apps, as well as discussing the benefits and drawbacks of each. These are the two main pieces of a mobile strategy and understanding them individually is crucial to crafting an effective mobile app development plan. But, knowing how and when to combine these technologies is what sets the top mobile players apart. This article’s aim is to help guide your mobile app development approach. I will provide examples of when certain technologies are effective, required, or even discouraged and will also discuss the ultimate ideal of a complete mobile app development plan. ##The Foundation of Mobile App Development - Mobile Websites The majority of web browsing today takes place on mobile devices. Moreover, the number of mobile devices and mobile users is continuing to grow. Since most, or nearly all, desktop websites are frustrating and sub-optimal for mobile users, you need a mobile website to accommodate and acquire these mobile browsers, users, and customers. ##When are mobile websites needed? If your website is customer facing (meaning it is used by people who do not work at your company), and does not perform a task that is impossible on a mobile device, you probably fall into this category. To emphasize this point, you can look at your Google Analytics reports (which, hopefully you have setup or have something similar in place). In case you do not have yours handy, here is our website’s device overview for the past year: {% include full-blog-image.html src="Google-Analytics-last-year-mobile.png" alt="Mobile development google analytics" %} As you can see, almost 30% of our sessions occur on mobile devices. If your website is inoperable or frustrating when used on a mobile device, you are almost certainly missing out on a sizable number of potential customers. ##When are mobile websites nice to have? {% include full-blog-image.html src="Forestar_report.png" alt="Mobile app development read only" class="right"%} If your website is only used by people who work at your company, such as an internal customer management system, or offers a service that is too complicated to fully function on a smaller device, such as a day trading service, you might fall into this category. It might seem like this would put you into the “not necessary” category, but that is likely not entirely true. Often these sorts of sites could benefit from a stripped down or feature specific version that can function well on mobile. Imagine a scenario where on a full desktop web app, you can enter information about a new customer, create a sale, process payment, and fulfill an order. This might be too difficult or time consuming to do on a phone or tablet. But, if this website provided a read-only view of this order, or sales reports in a mobile friendly format, that could be hugely beneficial to users and managers. If someone is just making a mobile app, they might think that they would fall into the “not necessary” group. But this is not always true. Consider these apps that do not have any non-native app services, but still have mobile websites:

These apps have really simple single-page sites that describe their apps and provide download links in various app marketplaces. Simple, cheap, and effective. ##When are mobile websites not necessary? Some companies that just want to have a mobile app, might not need a mobile website. Here are some very successful apps that do not have (or at least do not appear to have) a mobile website: {% include full-blog-image.html src="flappy_0.gif" alt="Mobile app development - games" class="right" %}

Temple Run
Flappy Bird
Various Emoji apps

There are a few other websites that fall into this category:

Websites that are only accessible when in a certain physical location.
Websites that require a significant amount of data entry and simply require a keyboard.

##The Refinement of Mobile App Development -
Native Apps Unlike mobile websites, which offer the same or similar features as a full website, native mobile apps allow you to engage users more intimately and utilize additional information coming from the device and other apps. Because of this, for most companies these apps should be an extension of their offerings. ##When are native apps needed? It would be wrong to argue that every company needs a mobile app. In fact, I would argue that few truthfully NEED a native mobile app. The main exception are the whole host of companies whose main product is apps. This includes companies like King or Zynga. The other large group of companies that fall into this category are those with users who expect a native app. So, given that Facebook and Twitter have highly used native apps, any new social network should create an app as well. ##When are native apps nice to have? {% include full-blog-image.html src="Mobile-App-Development-Rush.png" alt="Mobile App development - Rush" class="right" %} This is probably the category that most companies fall into. There are so many scenarios where interacting with users in an app-like manner is incredibly beneficial. Being on users' devices increases your brand awareness, allows you to offer deals based on user information gathered from the device itself (such as location data), and grants you the chance to alert customers in a more effective and immediate form than email. The important thing to keep in mind here is that you do not have to simply create an app that does exactly what your website or mobile website already does. Think of these apps as extending or refining your offering, rather than simply replicating it. Maybe eventually your mobile app will be as fully-featured as your mobile website, but you definitely do not have to start there. ##When are native apps not necessary? It is important not to create a native app, just for the sake of having one. If you cannot offer your users something from an app that you can't through a mobile website and your users do not expect an app from you, maybe you do not need one at this time. But, I would encourage you to think hard and be creative before resigning yourself to this category. For example, think about a company that has a fixed or close to fixed cost, regardless of how many customers they have at a time. This would be companies like a movie theaters, amusement parks, oil and tune-up shops, or other similar service companies. Take the theater for example. If one person purchases a ticket, they have to play the movie. Every empty seat is lost revenue. Any additional patron would not cost them more. So, offering a discount to fill an additional seat is a net-gain, especially once snack and drink purchases are considered. The issue is that a theater only knows it will have excess space close to the start of the film. Traditionally, customers could not be reached in a timely and effective manner to fill these seats. But, if these potential movie-goers have the theater's app installed, the app can know what type of movies the user likes and where the user is currently located. The app can intelligently trigger discount offers based on this information and a few extra tickets can be sold. This one feature can quickly pay for itself. This is obviously a specific case, but the important thing to remember is that you should be creative with your mobile app offering and try to utilize information gained by being native. But at the end of the day, if there is not something there, there is no need to force it. ##Mobile App Development - A Complete Approach The final piece of a cohesive mobile app development approach is continuity between your mobile website, native app, and desktop website. This can include sharing an account (shopping cart, preferences, shipping info) between a website and an app. This is done by many retail companies, such as the clothing website JackThreads. It can also mean providing an experience tailored to each device that together create a complete experience. Myfitnesspal does an excellent job of this. It allows users to enter dietary, exercise, goal, and progress information through their native app. But the experience is topped-off by occasional emails containing healthy recipes or exercise routines, a website with a blog containing tips, message boards where users with similar goals can interact, and even some social network aspects that can motivate users to success and continued engagement. Some of these functions work best or only work when interacting through a specific interface, the crux of which is their native mobile app. But they have surrounded this app with various components to create a complete mobile app development approach. {% include full-blog-image.html src="Mobile-App-Development-MFP.png" alt="Mobile app development - my fitness pal" class="left"%} {% include full-blog-image.html src="Mobile-App-Development-MFP-2.png" alt="Mobile app development - my fitness pal 2" class="right"%} {% include full-blog-image.html src="MFP3.png" alt="Mobile app development - my fitness pal Desktop" %} ##Mobile App Development - Conclusion Many articles on the topic of mobile app development, as well as companies that provide mobile app development services, will try to convince all readers or clients that there is always a single answer. They might say that “a native mobile app is all you need”, “going native mobile is a waste of time”, or even “you HAVE to always have both.” This is simply not the case and is often a self serving argument. We believe and hope this series has presented a sound argument that, like in most things, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to mobile app development. I hope that this series has helped guide readers through the new and exciting space of mobile app development. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback about this series or would like to talk to us about helping your company with some mobile app development, we would love to hear from you.