Intro
Last week, in Belgium, we had an event which can be considered as a mini TechEd. Ofcourse, it's not called TechEd here, as it is not organised by SAP, but by the SapIence commision. (which is some sort of user group supported by SAP and Partners)
In any case, it's the biggest SAP Technology focused event we have and it attracted quite a crowd. We at EoZen make it a matter of honor for being present every year. We put in quite some effort in creating demo applications and do not want to hold this out on you.
Mobile Product Catalog
The Mobile Product Catalog combines the availability and user experience of your mobile, with the power of an SAP backend.
Your product data, pictures and attachments may come directly from your ERP, SRM, MDM, or CRM server and are stored locally on your device. This allows for quick access even when no connection is available.
Later versions will also feature direct sales order creation, availability features, even better user experience, and many more...
We created a small video (for back-up purposes) which we like to share with you. (notice: no sound in the video) The actual demo was done live, and repeated several times at the bar on our own phone.
Functionalities which we show:
- preferences: set username and password. (next version will also allow to set the categories to refresh and the service url's)
- Offline storage: first access of the catalog shows the products which were available in the offline storage
- triggering of synchronization
- browsing through the catalog (next version to provide search functionality as well)
- details of a product:
- Header details: fully flexible and dynamic. Just change the backend service to add fields, and the frontend will automatically generate them on the screen.
- Pictures: attached to the material in the document management system
- Attachments: non-picture attachments to the material in the backend system
- Gestures to switch between screens
Video has no sound:
Technological remarks
Note that this application is actually running on an android device, which is not yet supported by Sybase. Therefore, the entire synchronization and storage layer is custom development.
The entire application took us about 15 mandays, spread out over several evenings and weekends, making this quite a remarkable effort.
Attachments and pictures house in the SAP document management system (too often neglected functionality)
The services used for data retrieval are custom services built on an ERP system. However, they can just as well be implemented on a CRM, SRM or even an MDM system, making this a very flexible application.
