GHD – Order tool

GHD

Order tool

The project consisted in developing an order taking tool for the nomadic sales force of GHD France.
The vast majority of orders are placed directly at the customer’s premises by GHD France’s mobile sales force. The reliable and fast transfer of orders to the GHD France head office was a real challenge for the company, in order to ensure the sales objectives set, as well as the rest of the order life cycle: delivery, invoicing.

The projectu duration : 4 months
The total cost of the project was 80 man-days.

Details of the project :

Mission statement

The main objective of the project is to enable computerized order entry by the sales representatives directly at the customers’ premises. Thus an application based on our products was proposed. The application was designed and optimized for use on a tablet-pc with offline data synchronization.

It thus allows to automatically send, every evening, the orders taken by the sales representatives during the day, freeing them from double data entry, a tedious and time-consuming task that is a source of data entry errors.

The orders are inserted as purchase orders in Sage Sales Management and are available for processing (delivery, invoicing) as soon as the synchronization is complete.

Organization

For the realization of the project, 3 persons have been allocated :

1 project manager, technical and functional manager
2 development engineers

This contract was executed entirely with Tana Corp resources dedicated to the project.

Main characteristics of the client

GHD is a company founded in England in 2001 with an international presence. It specialises in the marketing of top-of-the-range products to hairdressing salons and beauty salons. Its turnover in 2007 was 115 million pounds sterling (approximately 138 million euros).

Conduct of the project

Advice and support role provided throughout the project

A real force of accompaniment: The organization of the project gives a primordial importance to the quality of the accompaniment, to make the customer benefit from the expertise and the know-how capitalized by Tana Corp on its projects of the same type.
Consulting strength : Our solid experience on management applications in the field of distribution and fixed-price projects has enabled us to provide the customer with the best market practices in this field. Moreover, Tana Corp is a force of proposal in the highlighting of functional options likely to bring a strong functional added value.
Expertise on mobile application: A large part of the application being developed on mobile/embedded hardware, Tana Corp brought all its know-how on the adaptation of the application ergonomics on a “small” screen in order to improve productivity.

Methodology proposed to validate the stages of the project from a customer’s point of view

Proposed project reporting
Weekly monitoring and monthly steering committee.

Tools chosen for the project management
Project Management: MS Project
Incident follow-up : BugX (based on Mantis) http://www.mantisbt.org/)
Version and configuration tracking: SubVersion (http://subversion.tigris.org/)

Solution features

Business processes covered by the solution

Taking orders in the field
Upload orders to the centralized server hosting Sage Business Management 100

What were the most difficult features to implement?

Read and write access to Sage data is done using an ODBC driver. The Sage database therefore accepts SQL queries through this method. However, this is not a standard SQL syntax.

Solution: Our technical team has been trained on the Sage ODBC access interface.

Technical platform elements

Software package, software or development languages used

After analysis of all the constraints, Tana Corp proposed the realization of a custom application, based entirely on a Microsoft solution:

Microsoft .Net Compact Framework, C# language

Reasons for the choice

Microsoft .Net Compact Framework with C#: In order to improve productivity, the interface had to offer improved ergonomics. The choice of this technology, as well as the embedded hardware, was made in close collaboration with the customer.

Share of pre-existing developments used on which the Supplier capitalized to complete the project

Alter Mobile Systems: M.M.F.E. (Meta Embedded Form Engine) created by Tana Corp. in order to respond generically to the problem of remote data entry on mobile terminals (PDAs, Smartphones, laptops, Tablet PCs). A.M.S. offers a complete information management chain, from the moment the user has entered the data in the field to its centralized storage.

Share of pre-existing developments used on which the Supplier has capitalized to carry out the project

The interfaces were developed without any pre-existing technological layer.

Ergonomics: daily use of the application in a production context,
Scalability: interface configuration options offering great flexibility in filtering the commands to be transmitted as well as a certain scalability of data exchange formats.

Challenges and key success factors

Embedded: application running on a mobile terminal: tablet-pc of reduced size and limited in performance and capacity compared to a fixed PC,
Ergonomics: daily use of the application in a production context,
Data synchronization and export: synchronize tablets with Sage Business Management using the AMS Synchronization Server.

Business result

Today, the application is used in production by about forty sales representatives. Orders are sent back asynchronously every evening, allowing the accounting and invoicing department and the manager to use the data without having to re-enter it.

GHD

Order tool

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