Mobile App Enhances User Experience

Challenges

With its customers in mind, Agilence is constantly looking for ways to modernize, improve and enhance its platform. Prior to engaging Weidenhammer, the platform lacked a mobile component to drive immediately actionable insight at the store floor level. With a focus on loss-prevention, Agilence and Weidenhammer set out to create a mobile application that would drive immediate value for is customers.

Solutions

In the first phase, Agilence and Weidenhammer focused on creating a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP – a mobile app that would drive immediate value as well as adoption. The MVP focuses on loss-prevention at the store level – helping alert retail, restaurant, grocery, convenience, and pharmacy managers to potential acts of fraud or theft. Agilence’s core platform 20/20 provides the data crunching and intelligence, which is then served up to store managers via our mobile app through push notifications, ribbons and banners. From there, the managers review a corresponding prescriptive action plan, drill down into supporting data, act on and close the alert, and manage all alerts from a central hub. While loss-prevention was the focus for our MVP, Agilence and its customers have several ideas for how they can extend the newfound mobility of their software solutions. With the future in mind, building the application to be scalable was key. Also key, was designing the app with an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface, as well as a look and feel that Agilence could proudly call an extension of its brand – this is where Weidenhammer’s creative designers came in.

From a technology standpoint, Agilence and Weidenhammer had a few choices. Since Agilence does not control or provide the devices, it was key to deliver something compatible for the vast majority of its users: iOS and Android device owners. Based on requirements as well as cost, using a cross-platform technology was selected over fully native, progressive-web-app and web-based development. Using Xamarin, a Microsoft cross-platform development solution, Weidenhammer created a common code base capable of deploying native apps on both iOS and Android devices. This helped to reduce the cost of the project and make for a quicker and easier implementation. The common code base will also help to drive uniformity and reduce maintenance costs over time.

Results

Weidenhammer delivered an MVP mobile app which enabled Agilence to drive immediate value for its customers, realized directly on the bottom line.  The app will also serve as a foundation for the future, on which Agilence can continue to build and drive value for its customers in the field.