Jewelry Field Sales

Field sales reps for a jewelry manufacturer run this program on an iPAQ Pocket PC to access over 3000 products and 800 customers, take customer orders, and submit orders over the Internet to a home office web server from which they can be reviewed and released into the central WDS-II distribution system.

Customers, products, new orders and other records are stored in a local Oracle 9i Lite database on the handheld device to allow offline use, since many customers are located in small towns with poor or nonexistent wireless coverage.

Using an attached barcode scanner, sales reps can scan product barcodes to quickly bring up pricing, a color image, and configuration choices for any product. Using the small handheld device lets the reps discreetly show the information to their retail jewelry store customers without dragging out bulky catalogs or notebook computers.

Order acknowledgements can be quickly printed on the spot, by "beaming" the report to an inexpensive thermal printer via the handheld device's IR port. Serial port printers can also be used.

Daily or more often, the reps connect to the home office system and run an automatic "host sync" procedure which uploads new orders and new customer information, and downloads any new products, images and other data from the host.

1. The menu page provides quick access to customers, products and customer orders, as well as other program functions such as "host sync".

2. A list of all open orders that have not yet been submitted to the host system is available in a scrolling window. Selecting an order brings it up for inquiry or to make last-minute changes.

3. Reps can find customer records by number or by the first few letters of the customer name, and can scroll next/previous by name. New customers can also be added on this page.

4. Products are viewed by scanning a barcode, or by entering a product number or barcode number. Reps can also scroll next/previous by product number. Small thumbnail "GIF" images of many products are stored in the local database.

5. When the rep clicks "Order" on the Products screen, the Order Item screen allows selection of quantity and product options such as gem size, quality and style, and special instructions. "Compute price" uses local pricing tables and logic to calculate the final price.

6. The Order Review screen allows selection of terms and special instructions for the entire order, and options to review the order line items or to print an acknowledgement.

7. From the Order Lines review screen, individual lines can be selected for editing or deletion. Line items can be sorted by any of the 5 columns (Description and Line Number can be seen by scrolling to the right).

8. The Print Order screen allows previewing or printing a formatted order acknowledgement to give to the customer, using either a serial port or IR port printer.

9. When wireless coverage is available, the rep can quickly submit new orders to the home office and receive any new product or customer data that is queued up for download from the host.