Trading agent app
A mobile application designed to streamline the sales process, and make field force managers’ work more productive
Short summary
Client: One of the largest liquor beverages wholesaler and distributor in Texas.
Need: A mobile app for Windows-based Microsoft Surface PRO tablets.
Challenge: Sales reps sometimes need to visit the areas with the low LTE signal, so creating the offline mode was one of the challenges along with making integrations with CRMs, and developing a reporting feature.
Solution: With the time-tested technologies, tight-knit team, and Agile management approach, we delivered a robust product in 5 months.
Impact: The application helped simplify the merchandising and ordering process. Now reps have more time for the presentation and communication with the retailer organizations’ staff. Our app eliminated the confusion with the availability of the goods in stock, actual prices, discounts, etc. As the final result, the sales have increased up to 20% in some areas.
Location
Platforms
Technologies
Duration
Team size
Budget
What’s the app for?
This application is a Sales Force Automation (SFA) companion app for sales reps. It was a part of the digital transformation strategy of a liquor beverages wholesaler and distributor. They needed to equip field representatives with the Sales Force Automation software that would improve the usual reps’ workflow. So, we have built an app compatible with the available 2400 units of 13-inch Microsoft Surface PRO tablets that the client already owned.
Core features
An up-to-date product catalog
Presentations of the product are an important part of sales managers’ work. Before our client had adopted this solution, they were showing some PDFs or information from the online catalog or sent it via emails. It resulted in the outdated information and challenging KPIs tracking. Our mobile app allows sales reps to always have up-to-date information right at hand. The catalog contains actual prices, and only those items that are in stock.
CRM
You can see all necessary information about each organization you’re planning to contact: its name, email, phone number, adress, etc. The “organizations” tab allows sales reps to see the data about previous visits and their results. Having the essential data available at any moment with or without the internet connection makes the visit planning process much more effective.
Products’ presentations media library
How the product is presented to the client defines the result a great deal, especially if we’re speaking about sales. That’s why the application contains a section with the created presentations of a particular product. It allows reps to access any data on the go and show interactive presentations in a form that works best for them: an online browser version or a PDF format.
Convenient visit planning
A Scrum-like visit planning tab provides a very illustrative view of the closest meetings. With this sales automation app, reps have the encounter schedule at their fingertips at any moment. They can see what organization they visited, who exactly they talked to, and at what day and time.
The reports dashboard
The dashboard allows to admins to analyze performance of some campaigns or particular sales representatives. At this tab, they can see what the most selling products are and what organizations are visited most often. Overseeing the data gives a clear understanding of what products are worth focusing at most of all, and what areas require some improvement.
Discovery stage
Who we build for
Goal
A client requested an application that should be able to track field workers performance, assist in customer-facing, and provide a set of digital presentation assets for everyday tasks. Some of the main challenges were:
- Create an offline mode for areas with slow LTE signal
- Design and build an admin panel with automatically based reports about sales reps’ performance
- Develop an application compativle with Windows 10 operating system to run flawlessly on Microsoft Surface PRO tablets already purchased by the client
Solution
Collected requirements
- Cloud services with the database and the mobile sales force automation application
- Compatibility with the available 2400 units of 13-inch Microsoft Surface PRO
- Functionality needed to launch interactive HTML5 presentations
Discovery stage
- We assigned a dedicated Business Analyst
- Performed a detailed analysis during the discovery stage
- Created about 10 presentations for online meetings with a customer
- Spent about 100 hours on documentation
Deliverables
- A software requirements specification (SRS) document
- A System Architecture and a Database Design document
- Final timeline and cost estimation
- A detailed project plan with milestones and sprints
SRS Document Contents
- User stories
- Acceptance criteria
- Business rules
- User roles
- Database design
- Wireframes
- System architecture
Highlights
Development and testing
Technologies
The tech stack was influenced by the devices already used by sales reps. The client owns 2 400 13-inch Microsoft Surface PRO tablets and we had to develop a Windows 10 UWP app to cut the cost.
Backend
71%
of devs would love to work with Entity Framework Core
32%
of devs choose SQLite over other databases
Frontend
10+
popular languages can be used to program for UWP
#1
IDE - Visual Studio - is used for UWP
Development tools
jira
785
tasks in Jira visible to the client
20k+
people can use Jira simultaneously
Development roadmap
We’ve been building sofware for about 10 years, and each project has given us some unique experience that we’re happy to add to our breadth of knowledge. One of the most important things we’ve learned is the significance of a well-structured plan. We create a detailed plan with sprints and milestones according to the software development approach chosen for a particular project.
Team composition
It’s sometimes challenging to find specialists for some technologies that are not a big hit at some point. For this project, the client needed to use UWP, and we were glad to offer our programmers with the rare expertise in this technology. EXISTEK specialists used their knowledge to provide users with a slick and simple touch interface, and great application performance.
Backend developer
Desktop app developer
QA engineer
Senior business analyst
Project manager
Desktop app developer
How we ensure visibility for the client
As long as our clients have full transparency during all development stages, we have their trust, and this is exactly what we aim for. We try to make the client a part of our everyday work: daily meetings and check-ins. We follow Agile methodologies because we completely adopt the principle of customer relationships over the strictly defined plan. So that, our clients are free to make changes on the go and access to the latest app version on their devices.
Highlights
Project summary
Our client admitted the major improvement of the sales force effectiveness with the new app. Leveraging latest sales force efficiency practices we managed to deliver the ultimate solution tailored to the specific business needs of the large liquor beverages distributor.
Now reps can better present the product and explain to colleagues how to use its advantages for better sales. Integrated organizer and always up-to-date data helped us increase the number of productive visits.
70%
UWP App Development
$84k
30%
Design and documentation
$36k
$120 000
Total project cost
5months
Total project duration
Development
Discovery
4 weeks
Development
18 weeks
Launch
2 weeks
Highlights
Our locations
Warsaw, Poland, 00-645
Bucharest, Romania, 011663
Vinnytsia, Ukraine, 21021
