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Articles from Mobility

Farmers Mutual of Nebraska Empowers Its Mobile Workforce

One year and an investment in technology have had a huge impact on how adjusters for Farmers Mutual of Nebraska process their claims. A year ago Farmers Mutual’s adjusters were largely working in a paper environment. They would go out to a claim site to inspect a loss, and prepare a handwritten estimate. If the loss was too severe to handwrite an estimate, they would prepare the scope notes of the damage and return to the office to complete the estimate using software located on their desktop PC.

Today, their adjusters are using convertible tablet PCs with a new tablet-based estimating solution from Symbility that allows them to perform the bulk of their work directly at the loss site.

The solution has proved so successful that 75 percent of their adjusters have actually asked that their desktops be removed from their offices.

Wachovia Reaches Out To Handhelds

Although online banking keeps skyrocketing in popularity, access has been limited so far mostly to desktop and notebook PCs. To give users of smaller handheld devices a similar sort of Web experience, Wachovia Bank has now launched an initiative dubbed “On the Go Banking.”

Since its rollout last September, Wachovia’s new program has served up an average of 8,000 sessions per day to users of Windows Mobile and RIM devices. In peak periods, usage can soar much higher. During December, for example, holiday travelers and shoppers logged into Wachovia’s banking site for as many as 12,000 sessions daily.

Mobility’s Future

If the popularity of RIM’s BlackBerry caught corporate IT departments by surprise, the threatened shutdown of BlackBerry messaging because of the patent infringement lawsuit by NPT was a second surprise. That has led proactive enterprise CIOs to take another look at their BlackBerry dependency and explore ways to reduce their risk by finding other suppliers of handheld email.