Although their rugged construction was well suited for mobile use in a hardware store and at building sites, Bell quickly discovered that the slates weren't very user friendly when it came to doing "office work".

"To put the slate on the stand, set up the plug-in keyboard and plug in all your drives was a real pain," he says, "so when the technology moved to offer us machines like the little Acer TravelMate we thought it was a very good advance forward, at least for our needs."

When it comes to equipping OCP's mobile workforce, leveraging benefits from the company's information system is at the top of Bell's priority list.

To reach that goal, OCP's sales force has been equipped with a call-planning application that helps workers ascertain where they need to go and who they should visit, "based on good, solid evidence of where they're likely to grow our business", Bells says.

OCP's system also gives employees a great deal of information about each customer; representatives immediately know what the customer's "debtors days" are, what their past sales history is, what products they buy and what products they don't buy.