Mobile Order Management
Mobile order management for the wholesale distribution industry is at a tipping point. We predict its adoption will erupt within the next 12 to 18 months. Long gone will be the days of sales reps slinging clumsy handhelds and laptops. Using them as proxy for true mobile order management apps running on smartphones or tablets.
Currently, more than sixty C-store distributors utilize Ai2’s mobile order management solutions. In 2014 something interesting happened: the number of C-Store end users running Ai2’s software on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, equaled the total number of end users running Ai2’s solutions running on handheld or laptop PCs. It took only three years to achieve the same total number of end users running our mobile order management software, retail sales execution and hybrid mobile CRM on smartphones and tablets that took an entire decade us to achieve for our legacy offerings. It is not the software features that have so much changed over the last 13 years; it is the mobile devices that are used to run the software. That is what is driving the rapid adoption of truly mobile order management apps and flexible mobile CRM in the C-store distribution industry.
Adoption of Mobile Has Reached The Tipping Point
The rate of adoption running on iPads and smartphones has been staggering. We are now at the “acceptance” phase of mobile in the C-store distribution vertical. This is the phase that occurs after the denial and anger stages, which the industry has been going through the last few years.
Order management apps on an iPad or smartphone is here to stay. Its adoption will accelerate. The first adopters of our mobile order management apps in C-store were the tech mavens Pine State Trading http://www.pinestatetrading.com/ and Harold Levinson Associates (HLA) www.hladistributors.com. Now the pragmatist C-store companies are moving to mobile order management apps. These are the “wait and see” distributors who let others blaze the trail. The pragmatists make up the majority of C-store distributors. As they rush the gates, we are now witnessing the closing of this chasm between those early maven mobile app adopters and the risk-averse pragmatist.
At the current rate of adoption, by 2020 95% of all C-store distributors will be handling all their mobile order management needs on smartphones or tablets used by sales reps and their customer retailers.