Introduction
RENAULT ESPAÑA COMERCIAL (RECSA) is the company in charge of running marketing campaigns that take place across the car dealers included in the RENAULT network.
RECSA has a network of 300 car dealers distributed across Spain.
All RECSA commercial operations are managed at its central offices where marketing car campaigns are also designed.
Solid Gear and RECSA work together to deliver an ad-hoc mobile solution that facilitates managing the rebate control systems which are applied to clients of the different car dealers and which are controlled by its sales experts.
The control RECSA carries out over the information and yearly audits is complex.
In order to streamline this process, it was necessary to build an intuitive, appealing, scalable and maintainable solution.
This solution will allow us to replace the work done until now with Excel and to go deeply into two main aspects:
- Efficient information management
- Streamlined data collection by auditors visiting car dealers’ onsite.
Solution
To meet RECSA needs, it was necessary an integrated solution with RENAULT corporate servers.
By doing so, they were able to handle all the data and information gathered from their dealerships and the different working areas could interact with each other during the onsite auditors’ visit to the car dealers.
People at RECSA are sales experts.
Solid GEAR provided a dedicated team focused on technology and mobility.
Solid GEAR team was in charge of conducting a full capture of the requirements with the client, creating a constant communication flow to pick new functionalities and assuring that the development RECSA was about to start was suited for the RECSA actual needs and its business singularities.
It was used a back-end development solution for managing the information and for its integration into the corporate servers.
Likewise, a front-end solution was built to help users to interact with the information.
After reviewing the requirements, we made the decision to create a mobile hybrid development for the staff that has to travel away from the office. This development was created to allow a multi-platform distribution.
Provided operations were taking place in environments with lots of information to handle, we must look for a simple mobility solution affording all available choices in a visual and intuitive fashion.
These features would facilitate managers and auditors’ work.
The application had to be easy to understand and able to replace the traditional way to work over a short period. Not only that, the training period required for the adoption had to be the least possible.
This solution would facilitate operations and reduce the dependency on paper and external items such as photo cameras and computers.
From that moment on time, operations could be done on mobile devices (i.e. phones and tablets) which would favour the mobility of the personnel.
Additionally, and provided operations could take place in a variety of locations, the app had work offline and store all the captured information to be ready for an online environment transfer.
Results
Thanks to the use of agile methodologies, more particularly SCRUM, we were able to enhance communication ̶ one of the requirements raised ̶ and deliver a customer needs oriented solution from the beginning to the end.
With all of these ingredients, we were able to create a more agile multi-platform mobile solution that manages all the information helping us to save precious time and to avoid the burden to ask for redundant information already requested.
Then all we need to do is to fill out (in the course of a single data capture) several fields of different forms and to instruct the auditor to enter each data only one time.
Also worth to consider is the fact that information would not be lost anymore as it used to be. From now on, the loss of documents will be avoidable as it happened in the past when docs could be lost during transportation or not requested by omission at the workplace.
The solution will start working during 2016 to support the 2015 audits campaign.
This solution represents a milestone for RECSA operational method.
This is the only system that can manage the whole working cycle, digitalizing information, storing data in a reliable server and allowing access to information at real time.
Additionally, it can assign work to the auditors, issue automatic reports and maintain the process under control.
For RECSA, timesaving, centralized and permanently accessible information result in money savings as well.
