About the Client
The Client is a world leader in manufacturing Power Tools, Hand Tools, Floorcare, and Cleaning and Outdoor Power Equipment. Its products were targeted at DIY users as well as professionals in home improvement, repair, and maintenance. The Client’s products are widely used in the construction and infrastructure industries.
Challenges and Considerations
The Client has a workforce of around 1500 field representatives that operate across 2000 DIY stores in North America and Mexico. It faced challenges in proper task allocation and feedback between the field staff and the central operations and marketing team about changes to be applied to the product layouts in the stores. This delayed conveying the required information and had a detrimental impact on their sales operations.
Without the much-needed mobility advantage, the flow of updates was affected, leading to challenges in visibility and availability of the Client’s products in the DIY stores.
Requirements
- The Client needed a cloud-based solution with the required mobility for its vast workforce.
- The solution needed to have ease of usage for 1500 concurrent users.
- The central team will generate, track, and review user tasks.
- The Client’s required a robust and reliable workflow for field representatives.
- The solution needed to generate instantaneous task progress reporting to the leadership team.
- There was a need for integration with Outlook to reduce dependency on non-SAP application
New Era Technology has provided staffing support for the Client’s SAP C4C (Cloud for Customer) solution. New Era’s strong domain experience, customer-centric approach, and ongoing engagement success made the Client choose New Era for the required solution
The Solution
New Era assessed the Client’s requirements and strategized a solution to meet the objectives. We provided project management, design, development, customization, configuration, testing, production deployment, and Hypercare support.
New Era collaborated closely with the Client regarding Organizational Change Management activities for communication and training. The development activities included close collaboration with SAP.
Key Challenges during the Project Development Phase
Extending Requirements |
Limitations in SAP C4C Mobile App |
|
The Client’s business users had a vision of the basic features they needed. During the end-user testing, they realized some of the complexity and challenges within the SAP C4C solution. This has been resolved with several requirement changes and extensions to ensure the experience for the field representatives was as comprehensive as possible. |
Together with consultants from SAP C4C, we had to work around multiple unexpected challenges with the mobile app. Several times, a process worked perfectly in the desktop representation of SAP C4C but did not port to iOS and Android App users. Collaboration with the SAP development team enabled us to resolve these issues and deliver a workable
|