The Core Challenges
UK's leading Food service delivery and collection provider, our client, supplies food items across the UK to customers of varied business such as restaurants and cafes. It delivers high-quality food items to 30,000 plus customers. The company had two sales channels - website and call center through which customers order online and also request for delivery of food items. To make the business process more efficient and intelligent, client wanted to revamp the existing PDA based system and automate the delivery process; by taking a step further, where drivers could deliver through IoT-connected mobile devices mounted in trucks.
The company wanted a mobile application with offline functionality such that the driver could deliver food items even in remote areas with high network problems. It wanted to eliminate their process of collecting the amount by making manual adjustments in the customer invoice. In addition, automatic mobile app offline data synchronization should be possible whenever the mobile connects to any available network or on request to a cloud storage. The client’s focus was on performance optimization since drivers would be delivering food items at multiple places at the same time and that the data sync should occur simultaneously for multiple devices. It also needed the tracking of real-time temperature sensor data for every 10 seconds and its visual output for analytics.
Building Xamarin Mobile App backed by Azure
Windows Phone 8.1, SQLite, Azure Mobile Services, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Event Hubs & Stream Analytics, Microsoft Power BI
Saviant team has devised a Field-Mobility solution that helped the client to offer differentiated food delivery service for its customers. Xamarin development platform was leveraged to build Windows Native Mobile application and Azure Mobile apps service was leveraged as mobile app backend to enable few application background tasks. The IoT sensors used in this solution are the BLE temperature sensors installed in trucks to capture freezer and chiller temperature of perishable food items.