Effective Mobile Data Recording and Storage
Since 1979, Radwell International Inc has been selling new and surplus industrial automation, MRO, pneumatic, motion, electronic, hydraulic, HVAC, and electrical control equipment for plant floor and facilities maintenance machinery. They pride themselves on providing high quality customer service and are committed to utilizing customer input to drive their product and service offerings. After developing a robust sales and repair practice in the United States, Radwell began to expand its operations overseas and now operates a significant portion of its business overseas alongside its domestic portfolio of services.
Challenges
Radwell tasks its sales representatives with visiting customer locations in order to review their inventory of Radwell parts so they can work with the customer to place new orders. The process required each rep to visit the site, obtain the part number of the inventory item, take photos of the piece, and then input that information into Radwell’s systems.
As an organization, Radwell is dedicated to iterating on its processes to ensure it’s a leader within its industry, and to that end, the Radwell team attempted to create a solution to this issue using Microsoft’s Power Platform. While this provided some relief, it still relied heavily on exporting the data to an Excel spreadsheet to manage the data.
So, they enlisted the help of the Hammer Dev team.
Solutions
Our team assessed the current process Radwell used, as well as the requirements they had for the application’s functionality and determined that custom mobile application would best suit the needs of the Radwell team.
For the application, our team developed a piece of software based in Xamarin, which is based in the Microsoft technology stack and uses a single language to create apps compatible across mobile platforms. This enabled our team to create applications compatible with both Android and iOS operating systems, and with Xamarin’s ability to create a platform-specific UI layer, the Radwell team would have an app that operated like a native application across their company-issued iOS devices while providing the flexibility to deploy it on Android devices if Radwell chooses to do so down the line.
In addition to the application, the Radwell team had to be able to transfer data from their device to an outside storage server. Given that reps don’t always have a strong enough connection to the internet, the team had to develop a way to collect the data and enable a transfer only when an internet connection is available. For this, the Hammer Dev team implemented an Azure Storage Queue and Azure Blob Storage solution. Once collected by the rep via the application, the data would then be sent to both the Azure Blob Storage and placed in the Azure Storage Queue for upload into an Azure SQL table for storage.
Results
With the implementation of the Xamarin-based application coupled with the Azure Blob Storage and Azure Storage Queue solutions, Radwell representatives will be able to efficiently record all necessary part information, its location onsite, enable better information management, and allow the upload and download of data from Azure-based storage. They will have the ability to collect the necessary information using their phone and will have the data transferred automatically once a solid internet connection is established.
This process will automate a workflow and manage data storage costs so that Radwell International can continue to provide innovative solutions to its customers.
The Hammer Dev team helped us develop a system that enables our sales reps to do their job more efficiently than ever before. Without their help, we would still be relying on spreadsheets to serve our customers, but now we can better align our customer experience with what people have come to expect of Radwell.”
