an ipad order management system for fashion trade

An iPad Order Management System for Fashion Trade

Ivano Baroni, Sonia Bergamaschi, Laura PoDepartment of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari”, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia,

ITALY

https://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/fashiontouch


An iPad Order Management System for Fashion TradeLaura Po - DIEF, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, ITALY

Special Session BAWEBIST 2013

• Quix s.r.l. is a software house located near Modena founded in November 2000 as a web company, now it offers a set of products that cover the specific needs of public and private sectors. The main application areas are enterprise portal, document management, information systems, business intelligence.

• Quix company has a close connection with the DBGROUP of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia whereby often collaborates to study new technologies and applications.

• The analysis and development of the App started in 2012 during the internship at Quix of Ivano Baroni



Fashion industry and mobile tablets

• In 2011 a 38% growth of e-commerce in the Italian fashion industry

• The interest of brands in applications of mobile marketing and services increases of 129% in 2011 (osservatori.net’s study, 2012)

• Mobile devices are the emerging markets that will drive growth and surpass PCs for online access (IDC prediction, 2013)

• Emotional factors caused by the adoption of mobile devices play an important role (Platzer, 2009)

• Users have showed a high attachment towards mobile services and possibilities these devices offer (Meschtscherjakov, 2009)



Why an App for the Fashion Industries?

• The area near Modena is crowded of Fashion Industries

The consortium• 500 companies in the district of

Carpi with highly specialized production in the textile-clothing sector

• This area is one strategic zones in the international fashion system

• The clothing industry gained importance in this area since 1950



What we already have: the OMS

• An OMS (Order Management System) is a software product for sales force automation (SFA) used in a number of industries for order entry and processing. Orders can be received from businesses, consumers, or a mix of both, depending on the products.

• Offers and pricing may be done via catalogues, websites, or broadcast network advertisements.



Why a Mobile App?• Traditionally, an agent visits the customers with a paper

catalogue, the physical products of the collection, and writes down orders by hand.

• By using an OMS agents can place online orders using the web application. However, in order to complete an online order you must have a computer, and a stable internet connection.

• Actually, the connection is not always available and reliable because some customers might be located in remote places.



Fashion Touch

• an iOS (iPAD) application for defining off-line orders for sales force of fashion industries

• one of the first Italian mobile app for managing orders in the Fashion Trade

• a mobile version of a web Order Management System(OMS) developed by the softwarehouse Quix s.r.l. for Fashion Trade companies



OMS, ERP and Fashion Touch Communications

• OMS web application meets the company sales force needs of having a centralized and automated collecting orders system connected to the ERP

Advantages of using an OMS:• The chance to conduct sales

analysis in real time.

• The Fashion OMS can be integrated with any ERPs. The integration process usually takes place through export of data in csv file

Fashion OMS - Technical specifications-Java Web Application built on the Apache Struts 2 framework -Central Authentication Service(users single sign-on authentication)



Fashion Touch in brief• Fashion Touch is used by the fashion agents that sell products of one or

more brands in a more or less wide geographical area.

• By using Fashion Touch, agents rely on :– An up-to-date catalog of multimedia content– High-resolution images (the quality is much better then the quality of images

on a paper catalog)– An OMS aligned with the ERP information– The option to define orders in offline mode– A step-by step procedure of customer, line and season selection – An easy access to customer information and geo-localization– A wide set of functionalities for drafting and editing seasonal orders:

• custom keyboard to simplify and speed up the process of order entry; • functionalities of viewing and editing the individual row order in details



Analysis - Development - Use

• Adopted Technology: Appcelerator Titanium VS PhoneGap

• Development: Architecture and functionalities of the App

• Use: A video demonstration of the App



Appcelerator Titanium VS PhoneGapAppcelerator Titanium• combines source code with a

JavaScript interpreter into an app package

• supports access to a wide set of native features and functionalities

• can be extended with visual components

• the gap between Titanium and a pure native app is reduced approaching to zero

• only available on the most popular mobile platforms: iOS, Android and Windows Mobile

PhoneGap• a web-based solution • utilize HTML5 standards • ensures a wide portability on

tablets and mobile platforms• native source code and libraries

for several device platforms • template for creating native

smartphone apps• the quality of GUI will vary based

on the quality of the web view and rendering engine platform



The Choice of Appcelerator Titanium

MOTIVATIONS• The target device was the iPad (no need for strong inter-

platform functionalities)• The creation of the graphical interfaces need a lower time than

the estimated development using web-based tools• Titanium guaranteed the best compromise between quality

and speed of software development and interoperability of different devices

• Titanium can be extended with free or paid modules available on its Marketplace. In the Fashion Touch App are actually included two of these modules and another one is intended to be used in the next future



Architecture• Titanium

guidelines of good programming - MVC (Modelling View Controller) pattern for web application development

• The modules have been implemented according to the task that they have to perform in the App

DB Manager Filesystem Manager Network Manager

Synch Manager

Customer Manager

Order Manager

Season Manager

Line Manager

Product Manager

Price Manager

Synch UI Customer UI Order UI

UI Manager

Business Logic

Resources Manager



DBMM - issues

The DBMM uses SQLLite database engine and faced several issues:• The database schema of the web application was very complex

and difficult to replicate on a mobile device: this highlighted a problem of choosing which data to import into the App and which data to omit

• The web application database included different data types while SQLite supports only few ones

• The type and amount of data stored in the App database have to allow maximum optimization in terms of performance when synchronizing with the server database and using it within the application



DBMM - operative choices• The adoption of JSON (Javascript Object Notation) as the data

format. JSON, text-based open standard, is based on:– a collection of name/value pairs– an ordered list of valuesJSON’s basic types are number, string, boolean, array, object and null.

• Simplification of the App database schema– only subset of tables are included in the App– for each table only the data strictly necessary for the needs of the App

has been selected: the columns needed to perform queries are reported, plus a generic column consisting of a JSON object containing the rest of the data.

• Integrating data types was a convenience choice to improve the speed of the application development.



GUI

• Fashion Touch GUI is divided into three sections: – synchronization– customers management–orders management



Synchronization

• Synchronization allows to keep the device data consistent with data of the OMS server

• essential to avoid the inclusion of orders on old data, i.e. items that are no longer available for the current season

• through a process of authentication, it is possible to download the data that the user is authorized to access (the customers, the seasons and lines for which agent can make orders), diversifying access to the data catalogue for each agent



Customers

The Customer section • shows the complete list of clients • displays the detailed information for each customer• gives the possibility of sending e-mail and geo-localizing

them• manages blocked or warning customers – for control

purposes, the fashion company wants to block the order emission for insolvent customers, the App has been refined in order to block the creation of an order or to advise about a critical situation regarding a customer



Order Generation ProcessNew order

creation

Season and customer selection

Brand/Line selection

Catalog navigation & Item selectionOrder review

Customer signature

Order transmission



Additional features

• custom keyboard and “mini” keyboard - the creation of a custom keyboard and a simplified keyboard supplies better usability;

• “tap” feature - an easy and quick feature to increase the quantity on a field, at each tap the amount increases by one, thus avoiding the use of the keyword

• box management - a box is a predefined mix of items for the same article in different size; an article can be purchased in quantities chosen by the user, or in boxes



Video exemplification

• 3 minutes



Conclusion

• The app optimizes the process of orders acquisition by sales agents working in the fashion industry

• The application is currently being used by three companies with a network of around 200 agents

• The App has become a point of strength among Quix’s products

• Fashion Touch participated at the Smau Mob App Awards (Bologna, Italy, 2012), by competing in the Task Specific category. It has been ranked between the four finalists among hundreds of participants



Future Work

• The App is continuously updated and integrated with new features following the clients’ needs

• Search for articles by reading bar codes (this functionality will be available thanks to a module from the Titanium Marketplace), the agent rather than navigate the standard catalogue, scans a barcode through the camera of the iPad (which identifies an item in a particular colour), the reading and identification of the code redirects the agent towards the insert page where he has to insert the quantity for that item and so on.



THANK YOU!• This presentation and all information about

the App will be available on https://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/fashiontouch• The App can be downloaded from the

iTunes Store

For receiving the test parameters please contact Quix s.r.l. www.quix.it



http://www.quix.it/