Mobile Device Management Trends for 2023: Automation in the Enterprise

Are you still manually provisioning devices? How many people are involved in your device deployment strategy? When was the last time you updated a device in your fleet? When it comes to device management for company-managed devices, there are a lot of hard ways to figure out a solution, but how do you streamline? We’re talking about automation here — a fleet that almost manages itself.

What if your new POS, kiosk, digital signage, or other devices could connect themselves to Wi-Fi and configure your specific settings directly out of the box? Or you could push an update out to a small part of your fleet, then roll it out widely automatically as long as there are no errors? What if your fleet was intelligent enough to alert you when a device is failing?

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Device deployment automation is the future

Deployment is a complicated process with a lot of moving parts. You have to make sure your devices get to the right location, all the necessary steps are in place to get them up and running, and you need a reliable tech (or techs) onsite to make sure it’s all done correctly. Let’s be honest here: this doesn’t scale.

If you have five new devices going to a single location, that’s not a big deal. But what if you have 500 new devices going to 30 locations? That’s time consuming — and expensive. By leveraging the right automation tools as part of your device management strategy, you can streamline this process to save time and money while also increasing your fleet’s efficiency in directly measurable ways.

Let’s say you need 25 new touch screen kiosks deployed across five locations. You’ve already built the software experience you want for these devices, you just need to apply it to your newly deployed systems. Normally, this would mean either shipping the devices to the sites and sending a technician out to set everything up, or possibly configuring everything at the office and shipping the product out to the location, hoping there are no issues during setup.

Now imagine a world where you don’t have to do either of those things. What if you could have your new hardware shipped directly from the manufacturer to the final location, then have it automatically connect to Wi-Fi and configure itself to your exact specifications? How much time and money would that save? The odds are it would make a very meaningful impact.

With the right device management tool, this experience is possible — and it’s just the start of what you can do with automation.

Robust device management requires robust device updates

What does your current update strategy look like? Do you regularly update your devices’ OS version? How about security patches? When’s the last time you updated your app? If your situation is like many organizations, the answer is probably “not as often as I want to, or should.”

That’s because sending updates to fleet devices can be a huge challenge — there’s a question of delivery, the problems associated with updating all devices at once, and how to recover devices if something goes wrong. With automated OS, security, and app update deployment, all these questions become a thing of the past.

If you need to apply the latest security patch to your POS fleet, there’s a chance you’re using cloud tools to get the update to all locations, but that still requires an onsite tech (or a very knowledgeable employee at the very least) to download and install the update. If you want to minimize downtime, maybe they have to do this in the middle of the night, which requires someone to be available at the device location at that time. No one wants that.

Imagine you could simply upload the update to your cloud management console, tell it exactly which devices to roll it out to, schedule it to start at a specific time, and start with a small group of devices, performing automatic checks along the way before pushing it out across the entire company. That future is actually a modern-day reality.

Using automation, you can set it and forget it (almost). You could apply a critical update to your POS systems across the entire company starting with just a small subset of stores. As all your checks are met, the update could automatically be pushed to more systems until it reaches your entire fleet. Of course, this doesn’t just apply to POS systems — tablets, kiosks, smartphones, or any other digital device in your fleet is fair game here.

An enterprise-grade device solution that delivers true automation

When it comes to automation, staged updates, detailed device insights, and reports that will actually mean something when you need them, the Esper solution is the answer. Our full stack device management system gets you from A to B to C and beyond in a truly seamless way.

You see, many device management tools stop at your software — they don’t take the full device experience into consideration. That’s where we’re different. We believe that device management is about, well, devices. When your software and hardware experiences are married — which is often the case with dedicated devices — you need a device management solution that operates the same way.

We bring automation, seamless provisioning, hands-off deployment, and a lot more into the fold so your management strategy becomes about how you can better innovate and provide exceptional experiences across devices instead of constantly babysitting your hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of devices.

If you’re ready to experience fleet device management in a way that will truly change the game, it’s time to give us a call.

Read our Report: The State of Device Management 2023