Retail and consumer goods firms face exciting opportunities to deploy mobile apps to fix their age-old problems with shelf availability and to empower their field employees to transcend their operational and transactional roles, becoming trusted advisors to consumers undertaking demanding trip missions. Application development and delivery professionals in retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers should seize the opportunity to deploy Forrester's framework to prospect for value from deploying mobile apps and then, before deciding whether to buy or build their mobile solutions, to determine which mobile operating systems and partnerships are most attractive.