APPLICATION DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Piaggio Loyalty Program - Dealers App

Custom Sofware Development

Project Brief

Design and development of a web-based extranet application for Piaggio Hellas S.A. The objective of the application was to track parts sales and vehicles repairs that are taking place in the official dealers and workshops of Piaggio Group.

The application that was developed, should answer the following requirements:

The application should be accessibly from all the dealers on a 24/7 basis
The application should be extremely user friendly because it would be used by people not very familiar with computers
Every dealer should have his own login credentials.
The creation of the dealers accounts should be easy and fast.
The application should produce aggregated and per dealer reports for the administrators.
The application should communicate with Piaggio's parts database in order to retrieve parts' characteristics and prices.

In order to answer the requirements of the project the approach of a multi-tier web-based extranet application was selected.

The application had two sub-systems. The dealers sub-system, where the dealers were logging in, in order to submit new sales and vehicle repairs and the administrators sub-system where the administrators were able to view and download aggregated and per dealer reports, create and modify dealers' accounts and perform maintenance tasks like updating the parts database.

In order to make the system easy to be used by the dealers, we developed a one screen data entry form with auto-suggest functionality and intuitive competion tips.

In order to always have up-to-date parts information and in the same time to be able to perform fast lookups in tables with thousands of records, we used a local parts database - a mirror of the Piaggio's central database - that was updated in a standard frequency defined by the administrators (every some hours) through SOAP web services.