Infor LN Mobility Extension for a Food and Beverage Distributor
Table of Content
2. Engagement Situation and Challenges
Our client is a multinational retailer and second largest bottler of PepsiCo products;manufacturing, bottling, distributing and selling over 70 million cases per annum of wide range of carbonated soft drinks, fruit juices and bottled water products in the Middle East region. Our client is responsible for sales and distribution of more than 120 stock keeping units (SKU’s) and has a huge set up of 3 manufacturing plants and 22 distribution centers spread across the Middle East Region. The distribution is carried out via 9 sales channels, using more than 750 vehicles operating six days a week. With this extensive network, our client is setting new directions for flexibly serving the market with customized services in the given area.
Our client’s efficient distribution network enables our client’s customers to optimize their own business operations, thus accounting for the short shelf life of the confectionary materials they deal with.
ENGAGEMENT SITUATION & CHALLENGES
Our client has Infor LN implementation that has streamlined the various business functions like sales, finance, warehouse, purchase, services and manufacturing.Our client followed manual processes to run their wide distribution and client servicing network inspite of having an enterprise resource package. Their manual processes were getting complex as their network progressed, thus making the operation error prone in terms of timelines, communication and customer satisfaction levels.
Our client realized that automating these manual day to day operations by taking the operations data (customer requests, customer contact information and annual maintenance contract details) to a mobile device would increase the productivity of our client’s service employees and in turn promise better services to customers. Our client was seeking to leverage their implemented ERP package Infor LN to develop a mobility solution which will enhance the quality of their service calls for the customers across the region.
Our client was keen on engaging with a partner having expertise in developing a comprehensive mobile solution in terms of functionality and performance coupled with technology to mobilize the increasing service operations.
Synchronizing the application for all smartphones /devices with the existing Infor LN, was one of the major challenges identified.
Some of key requirements of the engagement were:
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Auto generation of the customer visit lists on the field service technician’s device daily which gets updated in real time
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Segregation and allotment of the list of service orders and customer locations for each personnel
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Tracking the field service technicians on the move.
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Synchronization of service orders with Infor LN at any desired time
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Verification and updates of the service orders, comprising annual maintenance contracts as well as customer complaints in real time
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Development of online and offline modes of operation for mobile application.
Xoriant, having an extensive experience in developing mobile applications and implementing Infor LN Services module was selected as a partner for this engagement. Since the requirement was to synchronize the new application with the Infor enterprise system, understanding the various Infor modules was mandatory.
Xoriant’s team, with a right mix of technical and subject matter experts, identified and developed extensions to the Infor LN service module. This extenstion to the service module was designed to boost field service productivity by allowing access to Infor LN service data, checking inventory, process service orders from customer sites etc, all using the Smartphones.
Xoriant’s understanding of the situation developed from several prior customer engagements and our Enterprise Mobility Platform, enabled development of application for multiple mobile platforms, maintaining functionality and esthetic appeal across all platforms. To speed up and enrich the mobile applications for our clinet, Xoriant team leveraged Xoriant’s enterprise mobility framework, which comprises Xoriant Mobility server and Xoriant Smartphone Application Accelerator,enabling our enterprise customers to mobilize their existing enterprise applications on multiple mobile devices with minimal changes to the overall environment.
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Designed and developed standard Infor Adapters for seamless connectivity with the existing database to retrieve the customer enquiry forms in a defined format.
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Used Open Standards based Xoriant Mobility Server (XMS) which provided the foundation for integration between the field mobile applications on various mobile platforms and client’s Infor LN system.
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Designed and created a standard digital template to segregate the customer visits for annual maintenance contracts and complaint enquiries which allowed easy collection of the activities area wise for allotment to respective field service personnel on an everyday basis.
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Standardized forms used by field technicians for recording their customer-visits,which were fed to the Infor server in real time, thereby allowing synchronization of the master and transactional data any time with user defined validations/filter/criteria
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Developed a Scheduling Engine for merging all the information from service personnel and managing a complete inventory check on real time basis to maintain efficiency.
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Embedded a location based tracker by adding a chip to the Infor LN server to locate each field service personnel to update the service orders list on his handheld device.
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Implemented a real time alerting mechanism for providing updates to the field personnel.
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Provided a complete online as well as offline modes of operation by allowing the field service personnel to access the cached data , process the service orders and synchronize back the data later in case of no/low connectivity areas.
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Infor ERP
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Java J2EE Server
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Windows Mobile Device
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Increased client’s field service revenue and profitability by 20%
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Extended the reach of Service Order module beyond client’s enterprise platform to the mobile devices
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Improved Customer Service by 15-20% which was end goal of our client, by allowing field personnel to access Service data and take additional orders on the fly.
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Reduced costs by 30% due to elimination of paper work by auto synchronization of data between field service personnel mobile application and Infor LN.
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Increased the productivity of the field service personnel by 20% with optimal and dynamic tracking and handling the new Service requests on the move
Xoriant team understood our business problem correctly to solve it efficiently using their domain and technology expertise. The entire idea was to increase our business and productivity for which Xoriant delivered a robust solution taking minutest considerations of our extensive network driven business. Team Xoriant’s extensive experience and proactive approach helped us attain our goal successfully by releasing the solution on time.
CIO