The past two years have pushed organizations to find new ways to support productivity and empower workers to do their best work. In an earlier blog post, we shared the different ways organizations are adopting hybrid and remote work models across various user profiles.
These efforts are critical to the modern organization’s success and enhanced productivity, especially for frontline workers. As a step forward in this direction, we are excited to announce the general availability of Citrix Workspace support on Zebra Workstation Connect.
Citrix and Zebra have collaborated to help organizations give frontline employees secure access to the applications they need to manage high-volume tasks and better serve customers. Retail store associates, healthcare and hospitality staff, and car rental associates, for example, deal with time-sensitive tasks on the go. This high-intensity work, coupled with technology complexity, can significantly hinder the employee experience and affect business results if not addressed. Prioritizing their productivity is critical for customer satisfaction and to help ensure a great overall brand experience.
Zebra’s Android™ handheld mobile computers and tablets, in combination with Zebra Workstation Connect, have proved to be key tools across a wide range of use cases and industries, enabling mobile workers to access information and apps and create on-demand workstations with a true desktop-like experience.
Now, with support for the Citrix Workspace app on Zebra Workstation Connect, organizations can extend a secure workstation experience in a cost-effective, convenient solution. Users can leverage their Zebra mobile devices on the move and dock them to workstation cradles connected to external monitors and other purpose-built peripherals. This enables them to perform heavier data-entry tasks, navigate information-rich, data-sensitive apps, and interact with multiple apps simultaneously in multiple locations throughout a store, hospital, restaurant or other frontline location. Workers can seamlessly switch between a mobile device and a mobile-driven workstation on the fly, choosing the best mode for the moment.
Key Citrix + Zebra Use Cases
Healthcare: Enhanced and Secure Clinical Workflows
Citrix Workspace helps healthcare organizations provide more efficient clinical workflows for their staff members. This improved efficiency enables healthcare providers to focus on what matters most — providing safe, high-quality care for their patients.
Consider the following scenario — someone who is experiencing sudden pain rushes to the emergency room. While awaiting admission, a triage nurse can use a mobile device or tablet to access their digital workspace and create an electronic patient profile (EPP) that captures the patient’s protected health information (PHI) such as contact information, insurance, medications, and basic health metrics. From then on, every clinician with whom the patient comes in contact can access the data from their own digital workspace. There’s no need for the patient to repeat the same crucial background information over and over again, or for healthcare providers to rely on the on-desk nurse or paperwork to decide the next course of action. Instead, healthcare staff can dedicate more time towards managing the clinical case and addressing the needs of the patient from the bedside.
For heavier data entry tasks, a nurse can access the latest patient information simply by scanning the patient’s wristband or chart and then docking their Zebra mobile device on a workstation cradle to continue with extended, data-intensive tasks like creating reports while the patient goes through consultation and treatment.
Retail: Delivering Centralized In-Store Data and a Real-Time Experience
Retail is another common use case, as successfully juggling high-volume and time-sensitive tasks can lead to greater customer satisfaction, increased associate productivity, and improved business profitability. Citrix Workspace, in combination with our cloud services, helps with the integration of legacy or proprietary retail apps and makes them available to all stakeholders. Store associates, corporate office workers, remote staff, contractors, and third-party vendors can access data on any device, at any time.
With the Zebra Workstation Connect solution integrated with Citrix Workspace, critical information around inventory, shipping, and point of sale (POS) are easily accessible through one single pane of glass — the associate’s mobile device. As a result, leaders get a more cohesive view of the business, and associates can get to the customer information they need more quickly and efficiently – even when mobile devices are shared among store associates. With this integrated solution, process flow improves. And because key information about customers and their transaction patterns are more readily available, customer service becomes measurably better.
Car Rental: Secure, Productive Workflows for Field Staff
Car rentals at airport kiosks and other high-traffic locations often employ shift workers who share mobile devices to assist with rental orders, pickups, and drop-offs. Workers can leverage rugged, cost-effective Zebra mobile computers or tablets to get cars to customers efficiently and quickly. With more data-intensive tasks, staff members can simply dock their devices to instantly get an end-to-end desktop workstation experience.
In scenarios like this, companies want to ensure that users can access the apps they need directly, leveraging dynamic or static shortcuts via the Citrix Workspace app instead of searching through a long list of apps. While the field staff’s tasks are critical for productivity, management wants a central access point to data across different locations to assess performance and needs, all while meeting region-specific data compliance requirements. Citrix Workspace support on Zebra Workstation Connect removes this burden and helps management get the insights they need.
Highlights of the Joint Solution
With Citrix and Zebra, organizations can:
- Transform Zebra mobile computers and tablets into on-demand workstations that deliver a unified, reliable experience across the entire organization and workflow.
- Give mobile workers a secure central access point to official virtual apps, desktops, and hosted company apps based on user rights and data compliance across geographies.
- Place dynamic or static shortcuts on their home page, guiding contractors or field staff directly to the associated tasks.
- Provide secure access to internal web and software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps without a VPN connection, in addition to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) apps.
