Route orders that survive no signal

The distributor's salesmen cover their routes by bike, and about half of each route has no mobile signal. Orders were written in a book during the day and phoned in to the office in the evening.

Each order was handled twice, and the warehouse did not know the next day's dispatch until the calls came in. An app that needed a connection for every tap would have been abandoned on the first hill road.

We set the team up on Sajilo Stores, our order-taking app for distribution teams, with the phone as the place where work happens and the server as the place it ends up.

• Data kept on the device. Products, stock hints and parties are stored on the phone, so the salesman can open a shop and see its khata anywhere.
• Orders written locally first. Every order is saved to the phone and placed in a queue before any attempt to send it.
• Automatic sync. When a connection returns, the queue sends itself in order and retries with a growing delay if the network drops again.
• Admin review. Orders from the field arrive in a pending list for the office to check against real stock.

1. The salesman visits a shop and opens its khata on the phone.
2. He builds the order from cached stock, with or without signal.
3. The order queues on the phone and he moves to the next shop.
4. Back in range, the queued orders send themselves.
5. An admin confirms, part-confirms or rejects each order against warehouse stock.

The salesman never presses a sync button. He does not need to know where the coverage starts and ends.

Stock on the phone is a hint, because the warehouse may have changed since the last sync. Two salesmen on different routes can both take an order for the same last cartons.

Nothing is committed from the phone for that reason. The pending list is where overselling is caught, before a truck is loaded.

Orders are entered once, by the person standing in the shop. The evening phone calls are gone, and the warehouse sees orders arrive through the day as bikes come back into range.

The distributor's sales manager described it this way:

Half our route has no signal. The app does not care. Orders queue on the phone and sync as soon as the bike reaches the highway.