Preface

After tens of ICT-enabled construction, the tobacco industry in China is shifting its focus to "establish a comprehensive, accurate, and quantitative management system and transform management from qualitative to quantitative, from static to dynamic, from post-event to real-time, in order to enhance the industry production management level and improve the capability to cope with international competitions."

With the deepening implementation of Digital Tobacco Development Outline, a large number of labor costs have been brought into the ICT-enabled mobile construction in the tobacco industry. For the four types of involved personnel in the tobacco industry (technicians, account managers, distributors, and inspectors), they often work onsite but their services are offline. How to achieve high efficiency while ensuring information security is crucial to mobile office construction.

Challenges

Involved personnel in the tobacco industry are facing the following challenges in terms of mobile office:

• Difficulty in real-time monitoring: Involved personnel often work onsite and cannot be monitored, so they tend to do private affairs after sign-on. Account managers may handle private business during the work, do not perform sufficient customer visits, and report marketing information based on personal experiences, misleading tobacco production and hindering precision marketing. Tobacco technicians may not instruct the tobacco production and cannot keep abreast of onsite conditions, negatively influencing tobacco production. In addition, self-distribution, lack of supervision, the use of public cars for private purposes, and detour distribution result in low efficiency and high costs.
• Delayed information exchange and lowered work efficiency and quality: Involved personnel cannot receive or reflect information in a timely manner. Due to limited capabilities of tobacco technicians and lack of online expert assistance, production issues may not be handled in a timely or accurate manner. Inspectors summarize and analyze violation information on a daily base, delaying joint law enforcement and crackdown on violation sources.
• Information leakage risks: Account managers carry paper marketing materials that contain customer information, resulting in information leakage risks. The lost or disclosed customer information may be used by criminals to perform thefts or interrupt the market. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration of China has definite security protection level requirements for tobacco information systems. Mobile services require the interaction of internal and external networks and must meet level-3 security protection requirements.

Mobile Office Solution for Personnel Positioning in Tobacco

Overview

This solution involves four types of personnel in the tobacco industry (technicians, account managers, distributors, and inspectors), helps regulatory authorities position the four types of personnel in real time and keep abreast of production, marketing, logistics, and monopoly information, achieving mobile marketing, mobile monitoring, mobile distribution, and work supervision.

The mobile office solution for personnel positioning in the tobacco industry is jointed developed by Chinasofti International and Huawei. This solution integrates Huawei security eSDK and allows employees to access the corporate mobile service platform anytime, anywhere, and using any device. This solution uses multiple-fold security protection mechanisms (mobile device, network transmission, application, and sensitive data) to secure mobile office in an all-around manner, which achieves high efficiency while ensuring information security.

Figure: Huawei mobile office solution for personnel positioning in tobacco

Real-time positioning and precision management:

Use the positioning function to send location and time information to the personnel monitoring system through the GIS server, and monitor the personnel in a timely and accurate manner, which enables technicians to perform quality production instruction, account managers to perform precision marketing, and distributors to improve distribution accuracy and efficiency.

Instant information exchange and improved work efficiency:

Allow tobacco personnel applications to invoke the eSDK voice, data, and media functions to interact with the office system through the UC system and send onsite diagnosis and violation information in real time. Technicians can communicate with remote experts to resolve production problems in real time. Inspectors can promptly analyze data and perform law enforcement.

Information security:

Allow tobacco personnel applications to seamlessly integrate eSDK device security and data security modules, meet level-3 security protection requirements, ensure device, data, and data interaction security.