Many companies think “the system is live”: every office PC can open tickets and stock. Walk the plant room, the store, the loading dock—there is no PC, or there is one that needs VPN, a plugin, and fonts too small to tap in gloves. For the floor the system is not slow. It is not there.
Backfill turns the system into an after-the-fact essay
Coming back at night to fill a patrol from photos asks the system to record memory, not the floor. Missed items, swapped points, and “done” checks on work that never happened all land in that backfill. On-time rates on the admin screen are fake. Push reporting into three on-site steps before you talk about less rework; see Finish patrols on site, cut rework. The case for putting work on the phone is in Why work has to happen on the phone.
All four roles fall off in front of a PC
Employees: patrol staff, installers and drivers have no desk. Customers: they will not install your remote desktop to check a shipment. Stores: peak hours leave nobody to walk back and redeem on a PC. Suppliers: they will not log into your intranet. A PC only serves planners and finance who sit down. How stores share HQ stock and membership is in After the store app shares HQ stock and membership. If suppliers still mail spreadsheets, see Why suppliers cannot live on emailed spreadsheets.
Do not stall the entry with “we will hang a tablet later”
A wall-mounted PC on the floor often becomes a screensaver nobody signs into. What works is the phone already in a pocket: scan, photo, push tasks. Whether you need native depends on push and offline, not on looking official. The decision is in When you actually need a native APP.
List who is away from a desk all day, and scope shrinks itself
Write three columns: person, place, actions that must finish on the spot. A patrol tech in the plant room needs checkboxes and photos. An installer at a customer site needs check-in and a completion shot. A clerk at a peak counter needs redemption. A driver at the dock needs a sign-off. That table tells you immediately who will never open a VPN. Phase one covers the two or three actions that show up most. Do not also dump office report menus onto the phone. Reports stay on the web. The phone only takes the floor. Intranet accounts, certificate logins and SMS codes that never arrive on site will kill a PC plan in the first minute.
Do not accept the system on a conference-room projector. Walk one person through a full shift: network, gloves, forced photos, and whether the office sees the submit immediately. If a field fails, change the field. Do not add training to hide a wrong entry. The gap between having an entry and not is in Field work with a mobile entry versus without. When DaXi Technology accepts a field system, we walk weak networks, gloves and backlight photos—not only an office demo. To name the roles a PC cannot reach, list who never sits at a computer on the mobile service page.