Western Office Interiors
About Western Office Interiors
Western Office Interiors (WOI) is a world class furniture dealership, offering solutions to premium clients, across diverse business domains. The company utilizes its considerable industry experience to provide furnishing solutions that meet the functional and budgetary requirements of its clients. Western Office Interior leverages its relationships with leading furniture manufacturers, to provide clients with reasonable and competitive costing. WOI’s business model consists of a 'Service Hub' and 'Operational Spokes,' which serve corporate clients across a wide spectrum of businesses.
Opportunity
As a premier dealership that provides high-end furnishings to its clients, WOI wanted an iPad application that could act as a highly interactive digital brochure for its products. The primary purpose of this application was to enable the company’s sales executives to show the digital brochure to their clients during meetings, and allow clients to choose their products and specific customizations in real time. The objective was to make product selection smoother, more interactive, and less time consuming.
In addition to performing the role of a visually appealing digital brochure, the client also wanted the application to offer a custom project management module, with the ability to synchronize data. The module also needed to enable sales executive to immediately email project details to their clients. The client also wanted the application to allow users to manage product catalog data, using the live server to enable access to these updates in the offline mode.
Challenges
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Implementing a design that perfectly matched the requirements of the client’s concept, and made best use of the iPad’s screen size, and ability to display high resolution graphics; ensuring that the design was professional, stylish and had a unique look and feel.
- Implementing dynamic product hierarchy categorizations.
- Ensuring smart management of memory consumption during the image transition effect, for optimizing the transition process.
- Developing and deploying a process of synchronization between the live server database, and local app database, so that data can be accessed in offline mode; Enabling the user to synchronize data on the server, in order to send an email with the requisite information to the client.
- Implementing Boolean operators based search functionality, used when there are a large number of images, products or services.
- Advanced search functionality where users can search for products across diverse categories.
- Developing and integrating a comprehensive project management module that enables users to create, update, manage and sync projects.
- Ensuring that the application can recognize and manage diverse file formats.
- Developing and integrating a user specific module and rights management.
- Guaranteeing that the application can only be accessed by pre-defined users, decided by the admin.
Execution
PLAVEB’s proven expertise, and proficiency with the latest version of the iOS, allowed us to execute this project faultlessly. Our in-depth understanding of the project, and clarity on the range of features needed by the client, allowed us to develop an iPad application that perfectly realized the client’s concept. From conceptualization through to submission, we made sure that the client was kept in the loop regarding the development, ensuring that the project was approved of every step of the way .
Results
This cutting edge application is all that the client wanted, and has enhanced the client’s operational efficiency. It’s an iPad application that acts as a highly interactive digital brochure, to showcases the company’s product portfolio in a visually striking and extremely engaging way. Using this application, sales executives help prospective clients make an informed decision regarding the furniture products on offer. From project creation and management, to ensuring synchronization between the server side and app database, this valuable application provides efficiency, stability and reliability.
Technical Details
This iPad application has been developed on the iOS 4 platform, within a Cocoa Framework using xCode, Objective C, SQLite relational database management system, and XML Parsing for data sync.