Background
The critical operational information required to make decisions, plan, perform work and service customers varies greatly and is typically spread across a number of disparate information systems. This siloed ecosystem has traditionally made it difficult for users to take full advantage of the operational information at hand experience the true benefits it can deliver.
At Elafent, our foundational philosophy of liberating information from disparate silos has driven a tectonic shift in how organisations operate and engage with staff, customers and peer organisations. Through the Elafent Cloud Platform (ECP), we break down the technical, usability and budgetary barriers so everyone can experience the value of having a complete 360-degree operational picture and understanding the sum of the parts.
Operational Challenges
Getting a clear and complete picture of operational information to support business operations has traditionally been a challenging prospect. In many cases -
There is a huge volume of operational data spread across a number of vastly different, disparate source systems
There is a large variety of operational information including structured and semi-structured data, unstructured content, images and video files
Operational data is frequently being created and updated at high velocity making it difficult for users to stay up to date and understand when the status of critical data has changed
It is often difficult to determine the veracity or trustworthiness of operational information
Users need to access each of these information silos individually to try and find a piece of the informational puzzle and then manually correlate it with pieces of information from other systems to form a complete operational picture
Each source system is complex in its own right and difficult for non-expert users to navigate with the resulting information often difficult to interpret and make sense of
Key operational information resides externally and is provided by external peer organisations.
These challenges are often amplified for field staff who are trying to access operational information on a mobile device, who at best need to navigate across multiple apps or worse may rely on "screen scraping" solutions to connect to non-mobile friendly information silos. In some cases, a user may simply not be able to get the information they need at all on a mobile device.
These challenges can lead to -
Critical decisions being made on incomplete, unauthoritative or out of date information
Reduced efficiency and resolution times
Frustrated workers and customers.
Operational Optimisation
The Elafent Cloud Platform (ECP) breaks the traditional operational paradigm by aggregating information from different source systems such as Asset/Work Management, GIS, CRM/ERP, SCADA/IoT/GPS/CCTV and EDRMS/CMS and making it available in a single, simple to use application on mobile (tablets and phones) and desktop.
The user experience is a critical aspect of the ECP. Non-technical users are able to get started quickly with minimal training and without having to be an expert in any of the complex source systems. This in turn, makes operational data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone to support intelligent data-driven business decisions.
The following screens show some key elements of this capability -
iOS and Android Support
The Elafent app is available on both iOS and Android devices to support a heterogeneous mix of devices in the field as required by staff, contractors and peer organisations.
To enforce high levels of device security and data wiping should a device get lost or stolen, the Elafent app supports Mobile Device Management (MDM) based deployments.
Business Impact
By utilising the Elafent Cloud Platform (ECP) from the field and office, our customers have reported it has delivered significant business value across a variety of business areas by -
Reducing the time spent searching for operational information
Improving the quality of operational decision making
Delivering better levels of customer service.