Business Case Study: CPS Energy And Lloyd's Construction

1.) In this week’s case study, two companies were shown to enable smartphone utilization to increase profits. The companies were able to reduce time spent managing resources, reduce man-hours both traveling to work sites and performing the job function, and improve overall quality of work. These improvements increased profitability by costing the companies less in man-hours, allowing them to downsize positions, and increasing the quality of the work to better service customers. The improvements were more reflective of utilizing cost reduction techniques. They were still doing the same amount of work but they were able to do the work better, faster, and with less employees and resources. All of theses improvements were enabled by the use of
They could have also used the technology to offer new products and services to their customers. CPS Energy could have developed an app that let customers track the technician, via the technician’s GPS enabled smartphone, to make it easier for the customer to plan ahead. Many companies that deploy technicians give customers a widow a time that the technician will arrive, for example any time between 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. This can be frustrating to customers because they will have to make sure they are physically present during those four hours (Jarvis, 2009). Giving the customer the ability to determine the exact time the technician will arrive at their house will increase customer satisfaction, dependability, switching costs, and ultimately a loyal repeat customer (Bode, 2014). Lloyd’s Construction used the technology to log jobs and update statuses. If Lloyd’s created a virtual company with its suppliers and customers, the customers could benefit through an application developed by Lloyd’s. This app could have the job log data, list of supplies ordered, project budget updates, and approved blueprints so that the customer could stay informed about the project status without having to go directly to the company. They could even take it one step further by bringing in furniture companies, interior designers, and network technicians into the virtual company so the customer can have a building built, outside and in, and only have to go through one