Australia winemaker to trial mobile app for Blackberrys

12.02.2007
South Australia-based wine producer McGuigan Simeon Wines will next week trial a new mobile application that is accessed by staff via PDAs.

The application will replace an inefficient paper-based system that involved tedious spreadsheets and plenty of frustrating phone calls.

The company purchased the Mobile Field Force solution from 04 Corporation to make its sales, promotional, and marketing information more consistent and available to management and mobile sales representatives.

McGuigan Simeon Wines CIO Ryan Klose said it will deploy the software over .Net-based BlackBerrys to reduce the high volume of phone calls generated by the previous system.

"The old paper-based system was unreliable, so there were a lot of phone calls between sales reps and the office," Klose said, adding that data had to be entered into spreadsheets for processing by office staff.

The solution will be deployed on a limited amount of PDAs for trial next week, and will go live for its 20 users at the end of March.