Business Situation

Pepsico needed to upgrade the handheld presales system for its national salesforce in Spain. They had to do so without disruption while at the same time significantly enhancing the functionality of the system to improve the productivity and effectiveness of the salesforce.

Specifically the goals for the new system were to:

• Design a user interface that is friendly and simple
• Provide salespeople with an improved communication system
• Improve the reporting capability and printer system
• Improve the functionality of the presales application
• Create a web interface for the direct introduction of orders, reusing Pocket PC architecture
• Integrate the data with the proprietary Commercial Management system which runs on a UNIX platform

Solution

Avanade created an architecture for the application based on three building blocks:

• PDA application
• Application Server
• Integration Service with Commercial Management System

The solution have been developed using Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server CE, Replication System, Microsoft VS .NET 2003 C#, ASP .NET. It is a customised sales force automation solution which enables order capture at store level. This enables capture of transactions around product sales and returns, charges/credits for empties, expiry of best before dates and delivery and return of empties.

Results

New presales system based on Pocket Pc 2003, which offers better functionality and performance.

• Implementation of the capture system for web orders
• Integeration with Host Client systems
• Real-time communication from the field enables much more effective centralized management