Mobile Inventory and Order Management David France and Ian Pearce Sybase Professional Services dfran

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Mobile Inventory and Order ManagementDavid
France and Ian PearceSybase Professional
Servicesdfrance_at_sybase.com / ipearce_at_sybase.com
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Agenda

• What is it
• What does it do
• How does it do it

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Mobile Order Management

• What exactly is Mobile Order Management ?

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Mobile Order/Information Taker What is it?

• Gives you mobile Point of Sale (POS), but
  residing on a hand held device
• Can replicate information held on fixed in-store
  POS
• Integrated with back office systems

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MOM How does it do it ?

• Data capture at the Point of Sale
• i.e. customers waiting in queues
• Data is then synched back to back office
• From many devices, or just one
• Back Office is now aware of what the customer
  wants before they get to the till

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And what tools do we use

• Hand held device
• Windows CE, PalmOS, or indeed Java
• A connection
• Either wireless or via a cradle
• A Mobile Database
• Lets try SQL Anywhere 8.0 and its UltraLite
  option

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And what tools do we use

• Synchronization software
• MobiLink from Sybase
• Database Server
• Something thats big enough to handle the traffic
• Try SQL Anywhere again, or ASE, or any ODBC
  compliant datasource

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Run that by me again !
MobiLink
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Developing the solutions

• Tools
• For Windows CE
• MS Embedded VC or MS Embedded VB
• Freely obtainable from MS web-site
• For Palm OS
• Code Warrior
• For Java
• PowerJ (or notepad !!)

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Development Tools cont.

• We developed our MIM solution using eVC
• And we developed the MOM solution in Palm
• Point and Click / RAD / blah blah blah -)
• Bear in mind that PB 9.0.1 (at the latest
  estimate) will support deployment to PocketPC
  2002

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Development Tools

• Palm PocketPC provide emulators
• Makes debugging viable
• (Avoid the first PocketPC emulator)

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Top Tips

• Living with the small screen
• Text input is hard work
  or

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Synchronization Questions

• Do you want all the data?
• More than one user?
• Can they make conflicting changes?
• How to keep keys unique

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Dave under the spotlight

• MOM developed in Palm initially why ?
• Porting to PPC how easy was that ?
• Any general portability issues ???

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Demo
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Mobile Inventory and Order ManagementDavid
France and Ian PearceSybase Professional
Servicesdfrance_at_sybase.com / ipearce_at_sybase.com