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

5 months

Team size

6 specialists

Budget

120 000$

Core features

Discovery stage

Development and testing

Project summary

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 It resulted in the outdated information and challenging KPIs tracking.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

Our client is a sucessful liquor beverages wholesaler and distributor in Texas that aimed at building the software that would level up field force managers’ everyday work.

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

We offered them a digital tool to interconnect all stages of the sales process: visit planning, visit, order. As a result, we’ve created a mobile app that provides sales reps with all the needed information on each step of this workflow. For example, quick access to the organization data during the call planing, goods catalog and presentation during the call, and an order form at the end of the visit.

Collected requirements

Client's vision and main goals

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

How we conducted the requirements analysis

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

What EXISTEK produced during the analysis stage

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

Highlights15
meetings
with a customer EXISTEK specialists conducted during the discovery
7
hours
of calls to define the essential points of further development
100
hours
EXISTEK specisists spent on the documentation development
4
weeks
spent on the discovery stage altogether
with a customer EXISTEK specialists conducted during the discovery
of calls to define the essential points of further development
EXISTEK specisists spent on the documentation development
spent on the discovery stage altogether

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.

UWP applications leverage the full set of Windows native features. Our programmers did their best to deliver a user-friendly interface without the need to interact with classic Windows UI.

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

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

Vladislav

Desktop app developer

Alexander

QA engineer

Katia

Senior business analyst

Darya

Project manager

Volodymyr

Desktop app developer

Andrew

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.

Weekly progress calls

Access to the app’s demo version any time

Dedicated project and account managers

Highlights15
weeks
spent by the development team on coding
120
hours
of project manager's engagement
3
weeks
QA team spent on thorough testing
18
weeks
duration of the development stage
spent by the development team on coding
of project manager's engagement
QA team spent on thorough testing
duration of the development stage

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

4 weeks 18 weeks 2 weeks

Discovery Launch

Discovery

4 weeks

Development

18 weeks

Launch

2 weeks

Highlights2400
sales reps
using an app daily
5
screens
to develop a product
24
screens
in an application
using an app daily
to develop a product
in an application