About the client

The pertinent IT arm of one of the world’s leading food and beverages organization has developed their own technology framework to better address their bottler needs. Named as ‘PACE’ the mobile application solution for merchandising the product, used by bottlers, the system was adopted to scale interoperable bottler needs and optimize turnaround time with simple, reliable experience for the end user. The overarching goal was to reduce the cost of ownership with a streamlined UI for superior customer and associate experience.

The first version of the mobile application was released for 8,000 merchandizers using the mobile application for merchandizing and SFA functionality.

Phase 2 of the mobile app was extended for the sales representatives with 22,000 users who used the mobile application for orders, forecasting and analytics.

The Challenge

Though the PACE set up was all in place, it lacked some of the most crucial capabilities that would help in the performance enhancement for the organization and fetch better business outcomes. For instance, merchandizing and SFA functionalities needed a primary revisiting. The system so far lacked add-ordering capabilities. There were major gaps observed with respect to promotions and pricing, Asset tracking, forecasting and analytics, customer marketing agreement, and equipment movement order.

The legacy mobile application was scheduled to end in the year 2022 and the company was looking to avoid bubble costs for keeping two mobile solutions.

To enable faster time to market, zero licenses cost and an unconstrained platform solution with innovating the company’s specific features, the PACE solution was mandated to be built on a platform consisting of a collection of iOS and Android applications paired with a cloud native middleware.

Our Solution

CoreFlex is an AMS partner for PACE collaborating since 4+ years. As part of the ITIL process CoreFlex experts were responsible for incident and problem management

Additionally, CoreFlex took the initiative to develop and enhance DevOps processes with a sprint duration of 10 business days. Developments and enhancements were part of localization specific to the bottler’s needs, which was not part of MVP. Implementation was done by Smudge.

CoreFlex experts took a look at the existing platform and designed an all-inclusive POC encompassing features responsible for planning, routing, visits and surveys, actions/PICOS, mileage and time-tracking, reporting, image recording and many more.

The tool was scrutinized to understand the following:

• How to effectively enhance the user experience
• Redefine the operating model to support rapid deployment
• Ways to ensure increased competitive advantage with an in-built SFA / Merchandising tool specifically for bottler needs.
• Improve the potential to save the system significant cost in both licensing, development and support
• Everything it takes to build increased functionality that provides enhanced bottler capability, flexibility, timeline speed, cost + ongoing support and maintenance.

Results

• Faster time to market.
• Continuous support and development to improve the customer experience of the mobile application.
• Zero license cost.
• Successful delivery of client specific features making it an all in one mobile application for all bottlers.
• Bottlers could share their specific requirements which got custom delivered to them.
• Proper methodology followed to prioritizing requirements which then gets enabled by CoreFlex.