Field Services
Digital Transformation
Trigent helped us to focus on customer needs and adapt to challenges in the marketplace.
About the Client
The client is a leader in the supply and servicing of uniform and work-wear programs along with delivery of facility service programs. Based in North America, with over 200 service locations, 250000 customer locations, and 10,000 employees, the company manufactures its own branded work wear, protective clothing, and floor care products outfitting nearly two million workers each business day.
Background
- The client had a catalog application on iOS/iPad devices, used by their sales team to prepare proposals for uniforms/work wear and facility service recommendations to prospective customers.
- The application allowed the sales team to drag and drop uniform products on male and female model images to help customers visualize the work wear with customizations such as logos.
- Selected products with details of customizations were sent as PDF documents to their back office operations.
- The complex details of product categories, hierarchy, options, images, and product descriptions were managed through a large Excel document.
- Changes to any of these product parameters necessitated a long, error prone, and delayed process to rebuild the application and deploy to all devices. This prevented the client from making necessary changes to the catalog.
Business Requirement
- The client deployed versatile Windows tablet devices that would allow them to run a variety of field and back office applications. Adapting their technology to the digital era, the IT team wanted the sales team to adopt a single device strategy and the digital transformation should lead to seamless integration with their back office operations.
- With increasing sales and geographical expansion, they wanted the application to support both US English and Canadian French languages for optimal customer experience.
- The client also wanted to gain insights into how their field sales team used the app. This analytics would provide them with vital digital data to upsell services to existing customers.
- Further they needed the ability to make changes to the catalog, or ability to add new images without forcing a build and deployment cycle.
Solution
- As a first step, Trigent's technology experts reviewed the current iOS application, its data structure and build process. This careful review led to a strategic change and a completely new architecture that addressed existing shortcomings.
- Using Xamarin platform and the MVVM Cross-framework to target Windows and other mobile platforms, Trigent's engineers built a catalog mobile application. The application leveraged third party tools for mobile analytics that provided app usage, user behavior and other metrics.
- Multiple language options were built into the application, so that the client's sales team in Canada could effectively use the application in multilingual areas.
- The new architecture included new server-side components that notified deployed apps of any data changes through push notifications. The apps could then pull the latest catalog data from the server. The app itself would not have to be deployed again.
- Following industry best practices, Trigent created a number of engineering documents that allowed the client's operations team to take ownership of the application deployment and build process for future enhancements.
Client Benefits:
- Trigent's solution became a "write-once, run everywhere" comprehensive application that provided consistent and familiar interface to the sales team across different devices and thereby improved sales/workforce productivity.
- The digitally transformed catalog application was now available on Windows and iOS platforms with a possibility to roll out other mobile platforms such as Android, with minimal effort.
- The client was able to make frequent catalog updates without the need to deploy a new app, due to the new mechanism to push updated data. This lead to quicker go-to-market strategy, huge savings in operational time and costs.
- With deep insight gained through mobile app analytics, the client was able to use app usage metrics to improve the field sales team's performance.
Technology Stack:
