Au Bon Pain’s area directors saw almost immediate results: pilot users had more time to manage cafe needs and spent less time on administrative tasks. No longer hindered by printouts, connectivity issues or being tethered to a laptop, directors are able to address cafe issues on the fly.

As a result, Mockler says, they are able to get to cafes earlier in the morning, visit more over the course of the day and focus less on administrative tasks and more on customer-facing elements.

“In turn, they are better able to guide cafe managers because they can help them take a step back while showing real numbers to support decisions,” he says. Rapid-growth mode Like many organizations, Au Bon Pain is moving from phone to e-mail as its main form of communication. Offering real-time access to information at the touch of a finger, mobile platforms are experiencing rapid growth: there were more smartphones than laptops sold last year in the United States, and smartphones are expected to account for 31 percent of the mobile handset market by 2013, according to ABI Research.

(Managers from the store to the administrative levels may be intricately tied into the same real-time network through mobile devices in the near future, Rosenthal says, but the mobile market still remains geared toward consumers.)

Au Bon Pain’s next step is to implement a mobile forecasting application that will have the ability to make real-time adjustments to labor and product offerings, further optimizing the customer experience and minimizing cost exposure. The company already is rolling out the forecasting application on a non-mobile basis to educate the users on the science of forecasting, Mockler says.

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