Businesses Welcome The iPad
Some time this month, perhaps even this week, Apple is expected to ring up the sale of its 4 millionth iPad.
And while the sleek, sexy slate has been aimed at private consumers, plenty of businesses are seeing the iPad as a productivity tool rather than a downtime toy.
Those companies are as diverse as a NSW chain of panel beaters, an online retailer based in Marrickville and a one-man video production company that goes to wherever the shooting is.
That the iPad is making inroads into the business arena, with smaller shops setting the pace, is no surprise to the editor of Dynamic Business magazine, Jen Bishop.
“Small businesses are very fast in adopting new technology,” she says. “They don’t have to get sign-off from the boss because the person buying the iPad usually is the boss. If you want an iPad, you can go out the next day and buy it.”
Bishop says small businesses “are also more willing to take a risk” than their corporate cousins.
This gives small shops an edge over the top end of town, provided they can find a way to put their shiny new kit to work rather than just kick back and play with it.
For smash repair firm Panelcorp, that means using the iPad as an on-the-spot assessment tool. This could halve the time taken by the current system of separate manual inspections and working up a quote on a desktop PC.
“That currently takes about two to three hours depending on the size of the job,” says the repair co-ordinator for Panelcorp’s Blacktown workshop, Ben Childs. “We’re currently trialling the iPad for mobile quoting so we can walk around the vehicle and do the assessment there and then, using a remote desktop app to connect the iPad over Wi-Fi to our workshop’s server.”
Childs estimates the iPad will save “up to an hour per quote and we could easily assess two more cars per day with that extra time”. If the trial proves a success, Panelcorp will equip each of its workshops with two iPads.