The client’s Asia Pacific operations cover Australia, New Zealand and numerous other islands in the region. As part of their efforts to enhance sales in the region, their field sales team visits every store and shop that carries their products and conducts audits and surveys of the inventory carried by the store; noting things like shelf space provided, product placement as compared to competitor products, variety of SKUs carried, products most sold, new stores in the area, etc. These audits were all paper based and the findings from each visit were physically submitted at the head office by field sales personnel the next day.

Being paper based the entire process was extremely cumbersome and time consuming. Another major problem was timely reporting, since sales managers could not review the findings of the in-store surveys until all the results were collated. This lack of insight severely hindered the regional sales team’s ability to take timely decision in response to market changes. Furthermore, since each sales rep worked on their own, there was no way for sales managers to track the reps’ activities or productivity in the field.

The client wanted to develop a mobile solution that would digitize this entire workflow, simplify and streamline data capture from the field, and help optimize the effectiveness of their sales teams. Having heard great things about Folio3, the client chose to partner with Folio3, to help them develop such a solution.

After evaluating the requirements, Folio3’s engineers designed and developed an Android app for the client’s Asia Pacific field sales team that allows sales personnel to conduct and submit sales surveys and audits directly from their Android smartphones. In addition to the app, Folio3 also designed and developed a web based dashboard that enables sales managers to view the results of the surveys/audits conducted, manage the app’s users’, the surveys and audits available in the app, and various other features. Key features of the sales survey app include: