The Good And Bad Of Tablets At Work

Stacked started in Torrance, Calif., in 2011 with the idea of serving highly personalized pizzas and burgers by letting people tap their complex orders into an iPad. The iPad offered a bit of novelty, too. But the newest tablets has delivered unexpected benefits, says Stacked co-CEO Paul Motenko: Orders get to customers about five minutes faster than they did without iPads, and 86% of guests say the iPad enhanced their experience.

We're still learning a lot about tablets -- what benefits they bring to business, where they don't work and what their limitations are. While iPads led the way, Android- and Windows-based devices are finding homes, sometimes creating new use cases.fdd2SDDxd1

Tablets, in short, are getting to work, and often doing much grittier tasks than taking pizza orders. The Drug Enforcement Agency, for example, is testing Dell Latitude tablets for its agents to use on stakeouts, and it could eventually distribute 6,000 of the devices to its employees,says Mark Shafernich, the agency's CTO. "We want [our agents] on the street, making cases," says Shafernich. Instead, DEA agents spend about one week out of every month filling out paperwork in the office.

"We've got 25% downtime, where they're not surveilling bad guys," he says. But with the Latitude tablets, "guys can type at 3 in the morning, while watching a dark apartment waiting for someone to come out." The tablets should also let the DEA reduce the number of desktop computers it maintains. The Latitude tabs -- less expensive and more mobile than laptops and equipped with a vivid screen that's ideal for scrutinizing intelligence photos -- represent a "game-changing" consolidation of technology, Shafernich says.

General Electric is looking to tablets to improve its factory operations and provide a new revenue source. Randy Rausch, general manager of GE Energy Storage, has been using iPads for the past year to help workers make better decisions on the factory floor. "If something is going wrong, we want to know as soon as we can, so we're invested in getting people information at their fingertips," Rausch says. Whereas supervisors used to sit in control rooms watching monitoring equipment, they can now use a tablet to carry that information wherever they want.

Monitoring, however, is only the first and simplest stage of tablet use, says Mark Bernardo, who heads development of automation software for GE Intelligent Platforms, the software unit that built its corporate sibling's iPad-based factory system. The second stage will be automatically delivering the right information to the right person.

"No monitoring -- they'll just be notified if there's something they need to pay attention to," says Bernardo, who adds that the ability to "take the control room wherever I am" translates to a productivity boost because it facilitates faster decision-making, cutting down back-and-forth between workers on the floor and those in the control room if a piece of machinery breaks down, for example. Tablets also let managers spend more time on the floor and gain greater visibility into daily operations.

GE is finding new benefits now that it has iPads in employees' hands. Maintenance workers are using the latest android tablet cameras to consult with one another about repairs, and field workers can use the devices' photo and geolocation tools to document their work.