Hi Russell,
I work for a large medical devices company, I head up our end user computing support team.
Essentially our business requirement was for our sales reps to be able to quickly and easily bring up product documentation (our products and associated surgical techniques and case studies, clinical trails etc) to present to potential customers (surgeons).
We equip our our sales team with a mobile phone & laptop.
Document storage and management in an enterprise organization is difficult, especially in our field where sales material pertains to products that have to go through regulatory approval. Products expire, data sets change etc etc.
If you imagine a sales fleet of over 200+ people, how do control and manage the content they are displaying to customers?
6years ago, we deployed iPads to our sales team and had a custom bespoke iOS app developed which integrated with our CRM, salesforce.com. This app was great, it categorized documents based on classifications, eg Trauma products where cataloged under Trauma, Hips and under Hips etc..
We also had the ability to somewhat control content visibility by only allowing the Trauma sales rep to see Trauma content.
There were various limitations and syncing content often failed over time, the only solution for troubleshooting was deleting the app and re-installing and re-synching which would take 3-6hours. We also failed to continually invest budget into the app so over the years the app was not updated and after the many iterations of iOS we found Apple had changed iOS11 to only run on 64bit apps, our internal app was 32bit.
We decided the best decision was to go to market and view cloud based solutions as opposed to pouring money into another custom developed iOS app, and that's when we found Big Tin Can.
My experience so far has been great and speaking with our sales managers, the feedback has been positive so far... though note we have only been live now for a few months.
What I love about the platform as a IT Manager are as follows:
- Cloud based platforms means no administration or server maintenance responsibilities, this is a HUGE cost saving let alone resource/labor saving.
- Platform Agnostic, we are no longer tied to Apple devices - in fact we contemplating ditching iPads and going to Windows based 2in1 devices as they are cheaper and more functional
- Strong and reliable platform, the app works and it works really well. Its very stable, we have yet to have a reported case of the app crashing or a reported bug. Likewise the UI is intuitive and I find it really easy to use.
- SFDC Integration - the integration into SFDC is simple & painless
- Capabilities, we are only using the app as a glorified document storage tool - the additional features available such as digital forms is interesting and we may look into configuring this in the near future
- Vendor support, our old app was custom develop - we have very limited support when it came to issues with app, with BTC we have direct support with the developers and any issues are addressed quickly
- Content Management, BTC does content management extremely well, there is allot of control that admins can do to limit visibility of content and distribution of company confidential data. Uploading and sharing content through the platform is also very quick and easy.
- Content Rendering, BTC renders PDF's, Videos, presentations REALLY well - there is no lag or jittering when displaying high resolution content from the app
- Offline capabilities, BTC can be used offline - content can be saved locally
There a bunch more but they are probably more applicable to an actual end user, such as the AI capabilities of BTC.
It will be interesting to see where BTH goes, I have high hopes and with the recent Verizon partnership - we have just opened a big tin can
lol
(20min delay)