AngloGold Ashanti – Mobile Asset Management
Executive Summary
As AGA begins to respond to the increase in demand and requirements for more mobile applications across its multiple lines of business, it risks developing a complex mobile application landscape to manage. The biggest challenge will be to simplify its mobile offering across multiple lines of business to realise substantial cost benefits. Other mobile solutions have been considered and had not been successful.
To determine whether using the TOKN Mobility platform to develop, manage and deploy Line of Business mobile applications, AGA could lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while offering improved user productivity, AGA (AUS) kicked off a Line of Business Mobility proof of concept (PoC) in July 2016.
Solution
For the POC the TOKN Mobility platform software was selected. This is a local supplier that specialises in Line of Business mobility solutions. TOKN provides a platform on which to build, deploy and man-age mobile applications and devices. TOKN was readily compatible with AGA enterprise systems – SAP. TOKN is compatible with alternate mobility MDM functionality such at Microsoft InTune.
TOKN Offers a full Mobile Application Management, Mobile Device Management and Mobile App Development functionality all rolled in to one. TOKN allows for rapid build of mobile applications, the build happens once, for all mobile operating systems while catering for customer specific requirements such as offline processing and Image conversion to PDF. TOKN ensures secure deployment of applications and software updates to target work crews and teams. TOKN also facilitates secure management of devices and applications with the capability to administer remotelyon bring your own devices.
The POC included the installation and set up of the TOKN Mobility platform on-premise. Using the TOKN platform AGA were successfully able to design and rapidly build and deploy 3 mobile asset management applications to select remote users on the Tropicana mine site. These included Notification Create. Time confirmation and Notification Display. A forth application, Inspection Sheets, was developed to further prove integration with SharePoint.
What we did:
- We rapidly built two test mobile applications using the TOKN development workbench in 2 Weeks. These High fidelity prototypes were used for usability testing to gain initial feedback, rapidly accelerating the design process.
- We successfully and securely deployed those same applications to select users at remote locations and mines sites in Western Australia, using different operating systems (IOS, Android and Windows Mobile)
- Using TOKN plugins we then rapidly connected the users to real AGA Data on multiple backend systems, including SAP and SharePoint
- Without any training users were able to capture and record maintenance tasks both in an online and offline fashion with favourable response times.
- IT administration were able to utilise a variety of Device including Tough Pads , Smart phones and windows phones.
Conclusion
The TOKN platform has allowed AGA to rapidly design and build device agnostic mobile applications for its maintenance business users. This has simplified the build process. Furthermore the platform integrates agnostically with various backend systems. As AGA extend on this and introduce new applications this ecosystem will incrementally grow. By taking a consistent approach AGA will be able to simplify this growth and at the same time offer the flexibility required to meet the needs of its different lines of lines of business. This has the effect of both simplifying the user experience and the extension of the mobility ecosystem.