Overview

PDA Sales Tracker is a sales-tracking software built for Jaree, a company doing the sales promotion surveys and analyses for HP.  This software stores the sales data, demonstrations, and different types of surveys conducted by each store of HP world-wide into a centralized database. The system enables efficient collection of sales and demonstration data, and has features that help to conduct different types of surveys and prepare various types of analysis reports.

The project contained features where the promoters could enter their product data using a questionnaire with responses sent via an HP iPAQ on a daily basis such that:

• It was easy to learn for promoters even though they did not speak English often.
• It minimizes the error rate vs. time required.
• It permitted weekly changes to the questionnaire.
• It was independent of an eventually non-existing Internet connection.
• The surveys helped Jaree to identify customers, promoters and store staff's opinion about the product.
• The image uploading feature could tell Jaree about the Shop in Shop (SiS) arranged store.

Technology

• Eclipse Europa
• MySQL
• Java 1.5
• Struts

Key Challenges

First of all, working in a completely new system like the HP iPAQ was definitely a key challenge faced. As the project progressed, we observed that there were certain scripts in Java that were not at all compatible with the working of the HP iPAQ. Besides, implementing schedulers for sending automatic time reports, its generation in the MS Excel format and country/store-wise listing of the products and questions in the survey were other major challenges encountered in the project. Lastly, we were also asked to design a User Interface appropriate for the HP iPAQ.

Client Feedback

The client was very much impressed with our on-time delivery schedule, communication and deployment of the project.  Subsequent to its successful implementation, Jaree has been using this product in many of their portals due to its extreme flexibility.