Setting Up Field Phones and Tablets So a Lost One Is a Nonevent
Why this matters
Field devices get lost. They slide off tailgates, get left on a customer's washer, and walk away from unlocked trucks at the supply house. You cannot set up a phone so it never goes missing. You can set it up so that when it does, the cost is a replacement device and half an hour of the office manager's time, rather than a weekend of changing passwords, calling customers about their gate codes, and wondering what a stranger is reading. The difference is entirely decided before the device leaves the office.
What "nonevent" means, as a test
Ask one question about every device you hand out: if this went missing right now, could the office lock it, cut it off from every account and erase it from a phone, within 30 minutes, and would anything on it hurt a customer if the lock failed? A device that passes is a nonevent. The procedure for the day it happens is owned by see related: The Lost or Stolen Field Device SOP; this article is everything that has to be true beforehand for that procedure to work.
The setup, in order
Enroll the device in device management before it leaves the office. Device management (often called MDM, mobile device management) is a console the shop uses to push settings to its phones and tablets, see what is installed, and lock, locate or wipe a device remotely. The major phone platforms have built-in enrollment for business devices, and many field service and office software subscriptions include a basic console. Enroll at setup, not later: a device that was never enrolled cannot be locked or wiped by the shop at all, and every other step below depends on it.
Enforce a screen lock through the console, not by asking. A six-digit PIN at minimum, auto-lock after no more than 5 minutes of idle, and the device erased after a set number of wrong attempts (10 is a common default). Allow fingerprint or face unlock, because a tech in gloves who has to type a PIN 40 times a day will find a way to turn the lock off, and the lock that gets used beats the lock that gets disabled. Modern phones encrypt their storage once a screen lock is set, so this one setting is also what makes the data unreadable without the PIN. Skip it, and a device that was simply picked up is an open book.
Separate work from personal. On a company-owned device, keep it for work: no personal email, no personal cloud photo backup, no personal social accounts, because each one carries the device's photos and contacts somewhere the shop cannot reach or erase. On an employee's own phone, use a work profile, a walled-off section of the phone that holds only work apps and data, which the shop can wipe without touching the employee's photos and messages. Whether to allow personal phones at all is its own decision; see related: Personal Phones at Work: The BYOD Question.
Give each tech their own sign-in, with a second factor. Every person signs into the field software, email and anything else as themselves, with multifactor authentication. Prefer an authenticator app or the platform's sign-in prompt over text-message codes, because a text code follows the SIM card into whatever phone it ends up in. Save passwords in the shop's password manager rather than the browser. A shared login on a field tablet is the single most common reason a lost device cannot be cut off cleanly, because revoking it locks out everyone; see related: The Shared Login Problem.
Keep customer codes and keys off the device's own storage. Gate, garage, alarm and lockbox codes live in the restricted access field of the job software, where they show only to the assigned tech for the job window, and never in the notes app, a text thread, or a photo. Set the field software's in-app camera as the way job photos are taken, so photos go straight to the job record instead of the device gallery, and set the gallery to clear after upload where the platform allows. Train one habit at the same time: a keypad, a key's cut edge, or a lockbox face does not appear in any photo. The rules for where codes may live are owned by see related: Customer Keys, Codes and Lockbox Custody.
Turn on locate and lost mode, and write down what the carrier will ask for. Confirm in the console that location reporting and remote lock work for the device. Then record in the device inventory its serial number, its hardware identifier (the IMEI, on devices with a cellular line), the line's phone number, and the carrier account PIN. The night a device goes missing, those are the four things nobody can find.
Let updates install themselves, and retire devices that stop getting them. Set operating system and app updates to install automatically, overnight, and check the console monthly for devices that have fallen behind. A device that the manufacturer no longer supports with security updates gets replaced at the next budget cycle, not run until it breaks.
Where the setup has to bend
A tablet that lives in the truck, not with a person. Two or three techs share it across shifts. Do not solve that with one shared login. Use the platform's shared-device mode where it has one, or require each tech to sign in and out of the field software at the start and end of their shift, with the app set to sign out automatically after a few hours idle. The device is enrolled once; the accounts on it change with the shift.
A device that takes card payments. If a phone pairs with a card reader, the payment app sits on a company device only, never on a personal phone's work profile, and its account has its own multifactor. Payment is the first account cut off when a device goes missing, so it should be the easiest one to find and revoke.
A seasonal hire. A ten-week summer worker gets the same enrollment as anyone else, set up on day one rather than "once we know they are staying", plus a return date on the device inventory. Most devices that go missing for good were assigned to someone who left before anyone asked for it back; see related: The Employee Offboarding Digital Access SOP.
A personal phone whose owner will not enroll it. Then it does not run shop apps. That is not a punishment; it is the only version of the rule the office can enforce.
Location tracking, and telling your staff
Most device management consoles can show where every device is, and many shops want that for routing and safety. Collect it only during working hours on company devices, never through an employee's personal phone or its work profile off the clock, and tell staff in writing before you turn it on.
This is not legal advice, and the law here is almost entirely a state layer. There is no general federal statute requiring an employer to give notice before tracking a company-owned device. Several states require notice of electronic monitoring, with different reach: New York requires private employers to give written notice and obtain an acknowledgment before monitoring employees' phone, email or internet use (Civil Rights Law section 52-c), Delaware's notice law covers the same three kinds of monitoring, and Connecticut's requires prior written notice of electronic monitoring more broadly. A device console that also logs app or web use can fall under all three. California restricts electronic tracking of a vehicle without the registered owner's consent (Penal Code section 637.7) and gives employees privacy notice rights over the personal information an employer collects. Other states say little or nothing. Check your own state's rules before turning tracking on, and if you are tracking anything a worker owns, or anything off the clock, take the written notice to an employment attorney first. A one-page notice that says what is tracked, when, who sees it, how long it is kept and what it is used for is the useful thing to bring.
Worked example: a twelve-device rollout at a lawn company
A lawn and landscape company has 8 company phones, 2 field tablets, and 2 crew leads who use their own phones. The office manager budgets about 25 minutes per device, which across 12 devices is 300 minutes, or 5 hours, spread over two rainy mornings.
The 10 company devices get full enrollment, an enforced six-digit PIN with fingerprint allowed, auto-lock at 5 minutes, and the field software's camera set as the job-photo app. The 2 personal phones get a work profile only, holding the field software, email and the password manager.
The rollout itself turns up four problems, which is typical, and each one is the reason a step exists:
- One tablet had no screen lock at all. It lived in a truck console and had been unlocked for two seasons. Step 2 fixes it, and the crew complains for a week.
- Three phones held gate codes in their notes apps, 17 codes in total across the three, typed in by techs who were tired of calling the office. Each code is moved into the restricted field in the job software and deleted from the phone. The office then asks those 17 customers whether they would like to change their codes, because the shop cannot say where else those notes synced to.
- Both tablets shared one login used by whoever was on the truck. Each tech gets their own sign-in; the tablets get a short sign-out habit at end of shift.
- Nobody knew the carrier account PIN. The owner set a new one and it went in the inventory.
Location reporting is turned on for the 10 company devices during working hours only, with a written notice read out at a crew meeting and signed by each employee. It is off on both personal phones.
The drill that proves it
Setup is not done until the office has rehearsed the bad day. Once a quarter, pick a device at random, tell its user, and have the office manager run the locate, lock and sign-out steps of the lost-device SOP against it for real, everything short of the wipe, with a timer running.
The lawn company's first drill took 22 minutes, inside the 30-minute test. It also failed on one account: the supplier ordering portal had no way to sign out a single device, which nobody had noticed because nobody had ever tried. The fix was to change that tech's portal password at the drill, add the portal to the list of accounts where "reset the password" is the only revoke, and take the portal off the tablets entirely. A drill that finds nothing on its first run usually means it was not run against real accounts.
References
- Your device management platform's documentation on enrollment, enforced passcode policy, work profiles and lost mode
- New York Civil Rights Law section 52-c; California Penal Code section 637.7
- See related: The Lost or Stolen Field Device SOP, Personal Phones at Work: The BYOD Question, Customer Keys, Codes and Lockbox Custody