A new crew is making its presence felt at many manufacturing companies. The members of this team, trained in the art of information sharing, can best be described as “grey collar workers.” They consist of executives on the road, engineers in the field, and operators on the factory floor. It is where blue collar and white collar unite, and the one commonality is mobility.
About three years ago, PepsiAmericas recognized that this next-generation information worker was playing a game-changing role in the organization, helping to streamline operations through the use of real-time information. So the company made a strategic decision to enable those workers by building out a wireless infrastructure, creating an entire mobile technology team responsible for designing and managing the network, the devices, and the applications.
In essence, Pepsi’s mobile team is on a mission to automate communications. “It’s about making sure everybody involved with a customer is aware of what needs to happen,” says Mark Hampton, director of PepsiAmericas’ Mobile Solutions Group. “It’s making sure the right data is at the right place.”
PepsiAmericas is the bottling business for Pepsi-Cola Co. It has a very large sales force responsible for orders, a warehouse team responsible for inventory, a distribution team that delivers the product, and merchandisers who put the product on the shelves. “The end goal is to have the delivery guy on the way to the store contacting the merchandiser so they show up at the same time to unload the truck,” Hampton says. Not that they can’t pick up the phone and coordinate schedules, but “the next step is to have them automatically communicate.”