What are employee apps?
As the name implies, employee apps are mobile apps for the employees of a particular company. Application areas include shift planning, appointment coordination, administrative processes, or internal communication. The app can be used by all employees, either on private or on business smartphones.
These different aspects are all covered by versatile features within a single mobile app to ensure that all employees are networked with each other and have access to company-relevant information at any given time. A digital data flow can thus be created in real-time, reaching 90% of the employees averagely. In contrast, previously used company-wide intranet structures have, in most cases, only affected the company administration.
Which advantages do employee apps provide for companies?
Of course, digital networking offers companies some significant advantages, not only on the administrative level. These benefits result from the question, "Which use cases should be covered by an employee app?"
- Corporate communications: Messages spread in real-time, and the reaction time of employees to urgent matters is shortened, while misunderstandings caused by lack of coordination are avoided. All this happens regardless of time and location and is therefore essential, especially for the home office or field staff.
- Forwarding of information: Documents, appointments, shift schedules, or menu plans are accessible to all concerned employees within seconds. Of course, it is also possible to send the selected information to specific teams, departments, or individual employees only, who can immediately process the data.
- Knowledge base: The app can be used as an internal knowledge base. This is especially interesting for the onboarding process or trainees and provides useful information to any staff member.
- Digitization of documents: By transferring entirely digital data, or scans of paper documents, document management can be significantly accelerated and nearly wholly digitized. These processes are independent of the workplace and can also be carried out at home, on a business trip, or the road. Replacing repair-prone and maintenance-intensive hardware with smartphones speeds up the work process while reducing costs significantly.
Build or buy an employee app? Which solution is more feasible?
Each case must be considered with its individual operational requirements to provide an adequate answer to a decision regarding in-house production or outsourcing. Both variants offer critical advantages and disadvantages. Especially for large companies, it is often worthwhile to develop their own employee app. They have software specialists with the necessary expertise and capital to cover the application's maintenance. The main advantage of proprietary software is the flexibility that allows the app’s functions to be adapted to the respective company’s individual use case. For instance, various app components can be purchased externally and integrated into an employee app with little effort by internal developers. This procedure is located between “Make and Buy” and is known as “Brew” in modern terminology.
Scanning capabilities enable digital document management through employee apps
The previously mentioned components are collected in so-called SDKs (Software Development Kits), which are available for various purposes. A scanner SDK is suitable to digitize and forward paper documents of any kind and contains several different components.
Even complex documents, such as invoices or driving licenses, can be scanned using data extraction. Here, the relevant information is forwarded to the backend. Using a Data Scanner SDK, selected, single-line information can be read from a document, such as an employee’s name and their driver's license expiration date. Solutions like these are perfectly suited for fleet management in large companies.
Medical certificates are the most common paper documents employees have to submit to the administration. This use case can be covered by the Medical Document Scanner, which retrieves information from the form. This means all checkboxes, date fields, and patient data of the types 1a, 1b, 1d, 1d, and 21.
Digital Knowledge-Base - Future-oriented work
Trade journals, books, or flyers are just a few examples of relevant information for continuing education in printed form. It is difficult for employees to keep track of available texts in their company and exchange them internally. An employee app can provide help. By integrating a modern Document Scanner SDK, content can be quickly digitized and stored in the company's digital knowledge base, sorted by topic or area. Every employee can then search for specific information within the app and directly access interesting contributions from their colleagues.
Data protection for employee apps
Scanbot SDK works exclusively with on-device intelligence: all data is processed directly on the end user's device without being stored on Scanbot's or any third-party servers. Thus, they are safe from external attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. The scan components are, therefore, compliant with DSGVO/GDPR and CCPA.
With our solutions and principles, we at Scanbot have created all prerequisites to protect your employees’ and the company’s data from external attacks and data leaks.
Would you like to discuss your individual employee app use case with one of our experts? We are looking forward to the exchange with you. Let's talk.
