HHC - Hand Held Computer System Development
The Opportunity
A large FMCG required a system which can be used by their salesmen, for a particular business model viz. Door To Door Selling used by them. They wanted a system on a Hand Held device, which would provide all the data required by the salesman, before he started his sales for the day. Also, it would provide a mechanism to transfer the data to the DC / Back-office at any point during the day / at the end of the day. The requirement was for an integrated application which would define the route of the salesman, capture the order and sales data during the day and transfer the consolidated transactions to the back office at the end of the day along with all the cash settlements required.
Our Approach
Provide an application which would run on the Hand held device and provide all the required interfaces for the salesman
- Sales (Customer Selection, Customer History, Sales, Returns, Promotions, Invoice)
- Order placement and generation
- Order Delivery
- Provide all the information required for end of day settlements
- Provide a mechanism to upload all the required masters / messages at the start of the day (Inventory Loading / Unloading information, customer / route information, sales history information)
- Provide a mechanism to download all the transactions to back-office
- Provide upload / download through TCOMM for full data / partial data either by connecting to the DC back-office system or remotely
Our Solution
- Develop an Hand held application, providing all the interfaces required by the salesman, using VC++ ( MFC – Win32 API - ATL - Com ) , embedded VC++ ( MFC – Win32 API - ATL - Com ), Windows CE Tools Library and Mobile Framework Tools Library (Third Party), which could be run on a pocket PC, using Windows CE operating system
- Data storage on the Pocket PC would be on Raima Database and data management would be using Raima Data manager
- Provide Infrared Printing support to enable printing of orders and invoices.
- Provide support for Bar code scanning
- Transfer data between the Hand held and the back-office through Afaria server. Transfer of data can be partial or complete and can be by connecting to the back-office system through the LAN or remotely
- Provide all the interfaces required by the HHC from the other back-office / legacy applications through flat files.
Business Benefits
- Salesmen get all the required data in a single application and do not have to track anything manually
- Routes are defined through sufficient help provided by the system, so that the supervisor have better control on the sales and are able to record more positive sales (low un-serviced customers)
- Salesmen are able to communicate orders remotely. This enables reduction in loading time and better inventory management at the Warehouse.
- Salesmen do not have to concentrate on anything other than sales and system takes care of all other data management, including settlements.
