Introduction This is the third article in my series on Sage’s new Web and Mobile applications that were released at Sage Summit this year. Previously I blogged on our Sage Mobile Service iPhone Application and our Sage Billing and Payments Web Site. For this article, I’m going to be looking at our new Sage Mobile Sales application. This application has two parts, an iPad native application for taking sales and a web site for managing inventory, customers and sales people. This application enables sales people to show customers products right from a catalog on their iPad, they can review and edit customer information, they can create a quote and have it e-mailed to the customer, they can check product availability and they can enter an order and accept immediate payment. Generally this application is best for salespeople working directly with clients to create a quote or order. It makes getting information on the items being sold easy as well as allows you to easily create the order. The diagram below shows the mobile application interfaced to the Sage Data Cloud and the Sage Data Cloud connected to the on-premise ERP system to synchronize data. You can take credit card payments directly from the iPad or take orders on account. If you take the order on account then you can use the Sage Billing and Payments application to collect the money which is also shown connected to the Sage Data Cloud. The iPad Application The sales people will install this native iPad application onto their iPad from the Apple store. You can see the Apple store entry here . This application fully uses the capabilities of the iPad to make life as easy as possible for the sales people. Below is a screen shot of the customer list: If you tap any of these customers then you will get more detailed information on that customer: This includes their contact information as well as giving you their sales history. Similarly you can get a list of inventory items and if you tap them you get detailed information on the item for sale: Notice you see the price and the quantity available. You also get a number of photos of the item. You can immediately add it to a quote. You also see links to similar items. The application is written in Objective-C and developed using Apple’s XCode integrated environment. Note that this application requires at least iOS 6 , which means you need at least an iPad 2. If you need to be truly mobile, then you would need the cellular version of the iPad (rather than the Wi-Fi only one) and a mobile data plan. The Web Application You use the web application to manage your inventory, customers and sales people. The initial data is uploaded from your on-premise ERP system, but there is some additional data that you would want to add to make this a better experience. Further this is a good portal to get information on how your sales are going and how your sales people are doing. Below is a screen shot of the inventory list screen: From here you click on an inventory item to get more detailed information: Here you do things like setup related items or add the item to a category (which makes browsing them on the iPad much quicker). You can also add more photos for the item. Generally these should be produced professionally and not just taken with your iPad camera. For the Team, tab you can manage your sales team, set quotas and see how your sales people are performing against their quotas. Connected to ERP Like the other two mobile/web applications I blogged about, this one uses the Sage Data Cloud and will work with any ERP that is connected to this cloud. Currently that is Sage 100 ERP and Sage 300 ERP with Sage 50 ERP (Canadian and US) following shortly. If you were to use all three of these application, you would still only use one connector which would synchronize ERP data to and from the Sage Data Cloud and would share common items like the customer master file. Credit card processing is via Sage Payment Services so again everything here is synchronized between the ERP, Sage Payment’s virtual terminal and the Sage Data Cloud. Summary This iPad native application is a great way to enable a mobile sales team to interact with customer and build quotes and orders. It has many ease of use features that iPad users expect and fully integrates with your current Sage on-premise ERP system.
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