Sales Force Mobile Application for Arpico Local Manufacturing and Distribution Sector

Abstract

The business systems in today's world have become increasingly distributed and the mobile devices have become a very important tool at the enterprise stage. Compared to traditional server based systems, the mobile extensions bring the business environment to a new array with its capability of having a large amount of processing power. As a result of this sales forces represent both a direct link to sales and expenses of sales organizations and therefore have a high impact on companies' profitability. Therefore businesses have constantly endured the challenge of getting their field force to adopt enterprise Sales Force Automation [SFA] systems. Richard Pieris and Company PLC having over fifty to hundred salespeople spread over the island in their Arpico Local Manufacturing and Distribution (LMD) sector, the order placing is done manually. The placement of orders is a main job in the company and due to the manual maintenance, the process is not efficient. Most of the times the customers do not get a clear picture on how much of stocks are available exactly and even the salesperson is also sometimes not so sure about it since there are many other sales personnel who are doing sales at the same time. Therefore as a result sometimes the customers are not happy with the service that is being provided since sometimes there could be orders placed but without having stocks at hand. At times like these to deliver the goods will get delayed. Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems create a new platform for a business to overcome past pain-points and to manage the customer pipeline information better. The project looks on how an SFA system can be implemented to LMD sector of the Richard Pieris & Company to achieve efficiency and effectiveness of the sales process. The Proposed system has many facilities such as order capturing at dealer level and flow the orders to company main Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), keep track of sales force by location tracking and route planning for sales force. Furthermore, company's basic requirements are primarily centered on a mobile dashboard application that allows real-time monitoring of sales figures and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), provide customizable dashboard views, real-time access to the latest data from the server, display information visually in the form of interactive charts and other details. This system develops on android platform and programming languages such as PHP and Java is been used. Also for the front end scripting languages like JQuery, JQMobile & Java Scripts is also used along with MySQL database. SFA system is mobile based because sales force can login to the system and enter sales orders from anywhere anytime even though they do not have an internet connection. To achieve this advantage it is decided to follow mobile based application. Through the proposed solution, The Company expects to analyze better sales forecasting and improve the performance of the sales process by automating manual work and also provides fulltime control over the salespersons. The system directly helps to increase productivity and helps to provide a better customer service island wide and by localizing the system. This system is mostly useful for the sales teams who are functioning in rural areas.