The Simplest Mobile Application.

One of my customers has been trying to address a couple of issues with their mobile work force.

• They sell items that are out of stock
• They don't sell items that are in stock
• They call head office too often to check prices

Before talking to NettMore they had started off down the route of a Windows Mobile application that synchronized the data each time the user conected, however this prooved to be pretty time consuming to develop, tied them into their existing mobile devices and the data was out of date almost immediately.

We took the approach of using a web application. Each night an inventory file is sent to a server in our data centre. A process loads the data into the database. Users can log in and see what is available.

We spent a lot of time working out what the best search strategy was. Whether to show results with all words, or any word (ranked), and ended up with all words. We can also control whether the results returnd are in stock or not, and whether they are "fast moving stock" (current) items. They can search by part code too.

There's 2 bits of price information. The RRP Price. There's also a price code which tells the rep what level of discount they can offer.

This project delivered a number of bonuses to the customer:

1. The reps actually use it (they didn't trust the old system)
2. We know the reps are using it, and what they are searching for
3. The internal customer services use it to look up prices as it's quicker than any other system
4. I've got a list of their products with a short description of each.

Why is number 5 a bonus? Because it means that, as I host their website, I could create some pages on the website that listed all their products. And they gave me some images named by product code, so I could automatically show these next to the product.

They weren't sure at first, however they are convinced now. When they look at their web analysis stats, a significant number are arriving at the site as a result of a product specific search, and these are often tracked straight through to them requesting a catalogue.

Content is king. Even better if you can use automatically generated content appropriately!