Why Xamarin is the best pick for Industrial Field Service Apps

Building a connected workforce and improving operational efficiency has been a critical challenge for Asset-intensive and Field-force driven enterprises. Enterprises have various field operations to run; for e.g., the food delivery workforce must ensure accurate delivery of quality food items to the customers. Similarly, other workforce deal with varied field operations that vary from one industry to another.

Until now, workforces have been executing their operations manually and entering the collected data after logging into their system at the workplace; consuming more time and effort. Also, they operate in remote locations and lack 24X7 communication with the team for immediate support. Accessibility to critical data from anywhere and anytime also remains a challenge. To overcome these challenges, enterprises need efficient field service apps to handle their operations, data, & workforce thereby improving operational efficiency.

A robust Field service app can help enterprises automate their field operations eliminating paper-based processes, allowing workforce to view & execute work order information, share updates, attach documents, secure data accessibility and much more in real-time. Thus, these apps can help achieve 100% visibility of field operations by setting up real-time communication between field workforce and the operations team.

However, developing such field service apps quickly for faster time-to-market is not an easy task. In addition, deploying the app across iOS, Android and Windows simultaneously is another major challenge for enterprises. They need a robust and unique framework for easy and quick deployment of mobile apps that meet their specific needs. Xamarin is one of the best mobile app platforms to build such field service mobile apps quickly. It offers a cost-effective framework to develop apps using single language C# and class library to run across all mobile platforms of iOS, Android and Windows. Listed below are the features that make Xamarin a unique development platform.

• Cost-effective Cross Platform Mobility Support: The tool offers mobile cross platform support for three major mobile platforms of iOS, Android and Windows Phone. 90% of the code can be shared across all major platforms. This significantly reduces both development costs and time to market for Enterprises.
• Offline functionality: Xamarin help develop apps that can operate even in remote locations. Offline sync allows users to interact with a mobile application, viewing, adding, or modifying data. When there is no network connection, changes are stored in a database. Once the device goes online, the changes can be synced with the app.
• Modern Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Xamarin uses Xamarin Studio on Mac OS X and Visual Studio on Windows. These are both modern IDEs that include features such as code auto completion, a project and solution manage system, a comprehensive project template library, integrated source control and many others.
• Integrated Xamarin’s Ahead of Time (AOT) Compiler: The AOT complier complies Xamarin.iOS applications directly to native ARM assembly code. For Android apps, Xamarin’s compiler firstly compiles C# to Intermediate Language (IL), which is then Just-in-Time (JIT) compiled for native assembly before the application is launched on Android.
• Strong Native Performance: Xamarin offers two commercial products: Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. Both products are built on top of Mono which is an open source version of the .NET Framework based on the published .NET ECMA standards. Mono and .NET framework have been in existence since the beginning and works on every imaginable platform that includes Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.
• Xamarin Component Store: A ready-to-use component store is provided by Xamarin, where we can get a massive collection of striking charts, graphs, UI controls, cloud services, new themes and various other strong features. The availability of such versatile features helps to add these components in Xamarin or visual studio to accelerate mobile app development process.

Xamarin is revolutionizing the way enterprises operate their business. Many tech savvy enterprises have already adopted Xamarin to automate their business processes and enhance operational efficiency. If you haven’t yet explored Xamarin’s potential for transforming your business, it’s about time you did. Xamarin certified consultants from companies like Saviant Consulting are helping enterprises go-mobile and deploy cross-platform field service apps quickly & seamlessly across iOS, Android and Windows.

As an instructive example, check how a telecommunication giant goes mobile with Xamarin based Field service apps to test and inspect the fiber optic networks in real-time. The company was able to achieve an efficient workflow management process for 2000 field-technicians to conduct more than 100,000 Fiber-optic tests.