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with the ERP that can record orders even if the inter-
net connection is not always available.
Broadly speaking, Fashion touch allows offline
browsing of the full catalog of multimedia content
(images items), it assists users in the order creation
process through a step-by step procedure of customer,
line and season selection and it displays customer in-
formation with the ability to send e-mail and geo-
location of the same. Moreover, a wide set of func-
tionalities for drafting and editing seasonal orders
(custom keyboard to simplify and speed up the pro-
cess of order entry; functionalities of viewing and
editing the individual row order in details before pro-
cessing it) are available. In the end, it is a multilingual
app.
The application has been designed and desired by
Quix s.r.l. that after developing the OMS web appli-
cation, has felt the need to put on the market a Mo-
bile version of the application. Fashion Touch is then
the result of a collaboration between Quix and the
DBGROUP of the University of Modena and Reggio
Emilia. In particular, the analysis and development of
Fashion Touch has been started during the internship
of Ivano Baroni on 2012.
Quix S.r.l.
2
is a software house located near Mod-
ena founded in November 2000 as a web company.
Quix S.r.l. has closely followed the ICT evolution
adapting its offers to the marketing requirements and
providing a set of products increasingly wide and
complete that cover the specific needs of public and
private sectors. The main application areas are enter-
prise portal, document management, information sys-
tems, business intelligence. The company has a close
connection with the DBGROUP of the University of
Modena and Reggio Emilia whereby often collabo-
rates to study new technologies and applications.
There are some other solutions of mobile OMS on
the market. In (Patrick Olson, 2010), authors describe
a Mobile Order Management System (MOMS) that
is designed based on a client-server model, with cen-
tral database serving as a repository of data relating to
customers and product information. The app has been
developed for smartphones based on the open source
Android platform. The application has been tought
to be able to work even in an off-line mode. IBM,
instead, proposed the Sterling Field Sales a caMo-
bile
3
application that provides timely access to prod-
uct content, pricing and inventory availability infor-
mation from mobile devices, such as Apple iPhone
and iPod Touch. The problem of developing app for
smartphonesis that they are not the best devices if you
want to offer costumers a chance to look at an high
2
www.quix.it
3
www.sterlingcommerce.com
resolution image of the product on a sufficiently wide
screen. Fashion Touch was developed for a tablet,
iPad, as the capabilities of easily inserting orders by
selecting items from a catalog of thousand of products
is unfeasible on a smartphone.
This paper depicts the different phases that have
led to the development and commercialization of
Fashion Touch until the publication on the Apple
Store.
The paper is organized as follows. Firstly, on Sec-
tion 2, the OMS web application is depicted. Sec-
tion 3 analyzes web technologies for mobile applica-
tions and their relative development framework mak-
ing a comparison with the Apple’s native program-
ming language. Section 4 describes in details the
mobile App developed, facing issues concerning the
network synchronization and studying the different
database solutions depending on the device hardware
characteristics and performances. In the end, some
conclusions and future work are depicted on Sec-
tion 5.
2 THE OMS WEB APPLICATION
Quix s.r.l. implemented an OMS web application to
meet the company sales force needs of having a cen-
tralized and automated collecting orders system con-
nected to the ERP in orderd to enable effective stocks
and productionlines management. The OMS is a Java
Web Application built on the Apache Struts 2 frame-
work and based on the Central Authentication Service
protocol to ensure users single sign-on authentication.
The application has been graphically customized for
different clients. Since Quix is situated in a geograph-
ical area crowded of fashion industries, the OMS was
designed to satisfy the needs of these commercial re-
alities. The recipient of the application are the fashion
companies, while the target users consist of the fash-
ion agents who periodically visit the stores to collect
sales orders.
The adoption of an OMS leads to unquestionable
advantages, such as the chance to inspect the sales
data almost in real time. With the traditional sys-
tems, agents delivered to the company the copies of
the commissioned orders after few weeks, these data
needed to be entered into the company’s information
system. Thus, the sales data could be analyzed at
least 1 month after the effective sale operation. One
month is a very long period in the fashion industry
because of the nature of the product treated. By using
an OMS, the company has the opportunity to conduct
sales analysis in real time.
The web app is a solution created to manage the
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