Platform Overview
The platform supporting ClickSoftware’s mobile applications was developed to accommodate a wide variety of mobile business applications, each having its own user persona, data model, functional requirements, work flows, and user interface. ClickMobile offers a single mobile solution which can be configured according to the needs of field resources working on smart phones or laptops, as well as the needs of executives utilizing tablets – all with drag-and-drop assembly and configuration of the apps at each employee’s disposal.
All of ClickSoftware’s solutions leverage the W6++ platform for enterprise workforce optimization and mobility. The W6++ platform contains a rich set of business objects for numerous W’s (Who, What, Where, When, for Whom, with What and more) which can be inter-connected in virtually any way; and whose behavior is governed by organizational structure, work flows, communication mechanisms, and business rules & objectives. Business objects can be easily grouped in various ways, e.g. job types, or engineer groups, and assigned standard or individualized calendars. A broad and deep library of templates prescribe business policies (i.e. rules & objectives) and work flows, and govern the behavior of objects.
With the W6++ work flow and user Interface engine, the business process for a mobile user is defined simultaneously to that same user’s screen layouts on the mobile device using a visual forms editor. This drag-and-drop, easy-to-use visual tool has tremendous expressive power to capture very sophisticated flows. If the 90% of requirements that are configurable (built on the needs of ClickSoftware’s 200+ enterprise clients) are insufficient for your business, further enhancement can be achieved via Microsoft’s Visual Studio with standard .Net development languages or from any other language supporting web services.
The power of the W6++ platform is the ability to represent a huge spectrum of business problems, along with all of the business elements and logic that enable any business problem to become instantly alive – as a harmonious orchestra of business execution which maximizes output for a given set of resources.
Business problems have a tendency to get filled with tons of real-life details. In fact, each aspect of a business problem may have many different forms and behave differently between one customer and another, between markets, resources, products, or other characteristics. One of the numerous examples is the treatment of assets for an organization. For this seemingly simple item, there are a variety of scenarios seen across industries, all of which are supported by the W6++ platform:
1. Assets are property of the servicing organization and of high value – requiring detailed asset management
2. Assets are property of the servicing organization but of low value – identified only by type and location
3. Assets are property of the organization’s customer and limited information is available to the service provider
4. Assets are property of the organization’s customer but are wholly serviced and maintained by the service provider
5. Etc.
Each such derivation of the treatment of an asset (or any other element) has an automatic treatment in the W6++ platform. Representing each business case is as easy as drag-and-drop. It means that once the business requirements are clear and mapped to business objects, there is an easy way to represent it within the W6++ platform. The pre-requisite business logic comes out of the box and there is little need for further action to make any service sector application “production-ready”. This level of flexibility requires hundreds of person-years of experience, much of which has to have occurred inside walls of service sector businesses. The existing customer base has run the system for more than 15 years now and is the ultimate source of business practices that have eventually built this knowledge base. This experience, combined with many years of development and refinement, have enabled the expression of the W6++ concepts learned over time to become the basis for a working software solution. If your solution requires a new business object (e.g. Retailer that decides to track customer’s home appliances); just add a new business object in Mobility Studio (referring to the first “+” in W6++). Does your business have millions of records for a business object (e.g. all residential appliances in N.A.); store it amongst the billions of profile properties and values, for which the W6++ has been proven to scale (referring to the 2nd “+” in W6++).
The knowledge and experience gained throughout the years have become the “contents” that the W6++ platform provides to represent the business problem, including a variety of business level “tools” that make the W6++ platform easily adaptable with minimal or no need for coding – from the user interface to the business logic. These “contents” and “tools” are the result of many years of experience including all of the pains and setbacks that can only be learned by trying, and which create a substantial and unique barrier to competition for rapid and agile value across industries.
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