No More Waiting

Before Bechtel Enterprises began deploying wireless technology, mobile workers didn’t have easy access to corporate information. If, for example, a Bechtel Enterprises employee in Asia was trying to put together a deal with a potential customer in that region to build an airport and wanted to show the client all the expertise the organization had in building airports, he would have to ask an HR person in Bechtel’s San Francisco headquarters to search the company’s ExpertLink database for a list of qualified individuals. The employee in Asia would have to wait at least a day to get the information because of the time difference and the lack of connectivity. Today, the remote Bechtel rep can get that information instantly on his PDA.

Submitting time sheets pertaining to work on U.S. government contracts was also a problem before Hernandez brought in wireless. Government regulations require the company to fill out sheets on a daily basis. Each time an employee fails to submit one on time, whether due to an unstable dial-up connection or the inability to locate a computer with dial-up access, Bechtel incurs a "substantial" penalty. (Hernandez won’t elaborate on the actual figure.) These days, Bechtel Enterprises’ mobile sales force no longer has to worry about temperamental modems preventing them from submitting their time sheets on time. They can access the time record application and submit their time sheets through wireless handhelds.

To access their Microsoft Outlook e-mail, calendar or contact information, employees had to find a location with a computer (if they didn’t have one of their own) and either a LAN connection or the capability to access the corporate network via a remote access server (RAS). "You’ve got a person sitting at a terminal waiting for, one, a connection, and two, for the data to come back to them via an analog line, which is pretty slow," says Hernandez.

While all that waiting seems like it would be enough to make any user scream to their IS department for better IT, Hernandez insists he wasn’t getting complaints from users about the difficulty of making those remote connections. "I think we were being proactive," he says.

Drop the Cradle

At the time Bechtel Enterprises decided to give wireless a whirl in 2001, 35 of its 250 employees were already using BlackBerry pagers from Research In Motion (RIM). But even with the BlackBerrys, users didn’t have instant access to the information they needed. Syncing the data on a handheld with the data stored in back-end corporate databases required a trip to the user’s desktop cradle, which was likely back in a hotel room or the home office. After he was approached by sales executives from Good Technology, Hernandez became sold on the basis of the company’s cradleless, wireless synchronization technology, the capability to wirelessly enable proprietary corporate applications so that users could access them from either their RIM or Good devices, and the fact that Good’s software will eventually run on other devices, such as Palms, Handsprings, Compaq iPAQs and Microsoft smart phones.