Mobile Apps in Engineering: A Process-Driven Analysis of Business Potentials and Technical Challenges

Mobile apps on smartphones and tablet PCs get more and more employed in enterprises to optimize business processes, e.g. by elimination of paper-based data collection. With respect to engineering, mobile apps provide a huge potential for increased flexibility and efficiency due to their anywhere and anytime characteristics, e.g., for product testing in the field. However, not every usage of mobile apps is beneficial from a business point of view and existing apps for engineering represent only rudimentary front-ends for stationary IT systems without an app-oriented redesign. Hence, there are three core challenges to leverage the potential of mobile apps in engineering: (1) identifying value-added app usage scenarios from a process point of view, (2) realizing a task-oriented and context-aware user interface design and (3) mastering technical obstacles at the app implementation. In this paper, we address these challenges by a case-oriented analysis of selected engineering processes in the automotive industry in order to identify engineering tasks suited for the usage of mobile apps. On this basis, we design corresponding engineering apps and analyze their business potentials. Moreover, we derive common technological challenges for the development of engineering apps, e.g. data synchronization aspects, and highlight further research issues.