Survey Application Using PDA | Easy way to conduct Survey - Case Study
Client Profile
The client is one of the leading field marketing agencies in UK, operating across all sectors of the grocery marketplace multiples, cash & carry, wholesale and impulse. The company works with many of the UK’s best known brands including Famous Grouse, Absolut Vodka, Tetley, and Remy Martin.
Business Need
Currently the client has around twenty three sales representatives. Each sales representative used to take care of approximately six stores in one day and they survey / audit around 5 products in their daily visit. The data collected in an audit / survey used to be filled in a paper form and sent to central processing centre via Fax. Thus, on an average, 30 forms were sent by Fax by every representative in a day. This counts to approximately 3450 paper forms in any given week across the organization. In order to manage this the data received by Fax, there was a practical need of having an application which can allow representatives to send the data in the survey forms to central processing centre via PDA / mobile phone and a web based system to collect, organize and process the data received by all the representatives.
Technical Solution
An application is developed that has two parts - A web based central system and a mobile application for PDA which will be sued by a person engaged in survey. This PDA application allows the sales representatives to enter answers to survey questionnaire and sent it to central processing centre over the GPRS network using PDA. On the completion of survey, the devices will upload the data to the server in central processing centre where the data will be processed and output in Excel format will be generated and fed to the analysis system for further use.
The solution consists of the following two elements:
Web application for managing and maintaining company data including stores, products, clients, client questions, client audits, etc.
Mobile / PDA application to input data by the sales representatives and synchronize with the web application.
Web application includes the following elements:
Base Data module – for the creation and maintenance of all data entities such as clients, products, store groups, stores, etc.
Client Question Templates– for the creation and maintenance of each client’s question sets, i.e. columns.
Dynamic Questions – for the creation of additional audit questions.
Audit Creation – for the creation, scheduling and deployment of client audit forms.
Promotions module – for the creation and maintenance of promotions.
Tasks module and database – for the creation and deployment of tasks (i.e. objectives/reminders) to the devices.
Reporting – for the exporting and access of data files.
Synchronization system – for transfer of data between the PDA / mobile devices.
Windows Mobile application includes the following elements:
A custom Windows Mobile application will use the information in the database described above to automatically generate the audit forms on the device at the point at which the representative signs in to a particular store.
The application will synchronise the database and audit information with the backend web application.
Benefits
The immediate benefits acknowledged by the client are
Manual data entry in the audit form in paper format is no longer needed, cutting out the opportunity for human error and freeing up significant resources.
Extremely fast form filling process used by the sales representatives by the provision of an intuitive, streamlined and automated means of entering the data using PDA / mobile devices.
The client benefited from significant cost savings on recurring expenditure – cost of paper, postage / fax, copying etc – and administrative resources.
Utilization of latest technology gave a competitive advantage and good market positioning to the client.
Ability to switch quickly back and forth between products and between clients.
Ability to mark products that need further action for easy reference as they move through the store, work with the managers, or retrieve stock and/or labels.
Tools and technologies used for implementation of website architecture
Technology used
VS2005 with .NET framework 3.0
Web client software factory (WCSF) for data access layer.
Infragistics suite for controls (ex. Webgrid, WebText, etc)
Windows Mobile SDK 5.0
SQL Server CE 3.0
Details A web application is developed with VS2005 including WCSF package. UI forms are kept in the website folder where as all data layer classes are kept in the module folder under objectives. The reference of WCSF was used to generate classes to access the data layer.
Tools and technologies used for implementation of sharePoint architecture
Technology used
Windows 2003 server operating system.
WSS 3.0
VS2005 with .NET framework 3.0
Details
C# application is created which generates one report for each client every evening at 12:00 AM. The installer application on the server at central processing centre inputs the documents into the SharePoint library. The customer accesses these Excel files by using WSS 3.0 document library.
