"The primary benefit is having the information required to do your job at the point your job is being performed," says Mike LeRoy, director of retail systems for Sears. "For us, it translates to increased productivity, better customer service and better sales because you ensure everything in the stockroom is represented on the selling floor."

For Sears, implementing the mobile solution went fairly smoothly, although moving some data from the Web to the mobile unit proved challenging. "Some of our webpages that contain processes and procedures had to be reformatted so that they were viewable both on a desktop screen and from the Palm," LeRoy says.

Never Walk Alone

While Sears worked by itself to bring its applications and data to mobile devices, that approach won’t work for every company. Partnerships may prove the rule rather than the exception, so it’s important to find a partner that can help you achieve your wireless goals, is viable, clearly spells out what it can offer, and can provide the support and training you’ll need postimplementation.

First, be wary of hype. "Don’t necessarily believe a vendor that tells you it can support all devices," says Adam Zawel, an analyst with the Yankee Group. "It might be able to support some functionality on several devices, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find it doesn’t support all the things you want to do on the device."

Also, don’t underestimate the task at hand. "The most important step is to make sure you have a partner who can deliver a solution that can be completely integrated," says Arch’s Schmersahl. "As you [put] piecemeal things together to try and find the right wireless network and the right developer and the right back-end system, the workload becomes quite oppressive."

Additionally, taking the time to educate workers properly and introducing the mobile solution through a pilot project can improve your chances of success. Sears’s LeRoy, for example, says he’d approach training differently if he had to do it over again. "I would go through an orientation on browser use," he says. "We did more of a hands-on approach, but we probably should have invested some time up front educating folks in the nuances of working in the browser world rather then assume they were familiar with it."

Hidden Hurdles

Even if you approach a mobile project carefully, problems still lurk. Today’s hot mobile technologies may not stand up to the test of time as their market emerges. Mobile standards are in a constant state of flux. New devices arrive every week.