SAP AG Announces Innovapptive’s SAP Quality Management App as the Winner of the 2014 SAP Mobile App Challenge

Innovapptive Inc. today announced that it has won the 2014 SAP Partner Edge Application Development for Mobile Challenge. SAP runs these challenges to identify best-in-class partner SAP mobile applications for mutual customers and received hundreds of submissions this year. Innovapptive’s five SAP® certified mobile applications were nominated by SAP’s jury panel to contest in a crowd voting event and Innovapptive’s SAP Mobile Quality Management App finished winners. The Mobile Quality Management App won the 2014 SAP Mobile App Challenge award with convincing margin of votes and the crowd voting was open to SAP customers and public over a period of 2 weeks.

Innovapptive’s SAP certified Quality Management Appprovides a mobile solution for manufacturing companies’ inspectors and operators who are constantly challenged with manual processes to capture accurate inspection lot quality issues. As a result of this manual process, they experience tremendous loss of productivity due to redundant quality related data entry and image capturing process to create an SAP quality notification for an inspection lot. The solution transforms manufacturing companies’ quality control and assurance process by being able to capture an SAP Quality Notification, along with images and GPS information – anywhere, anytime. The Mobile Quality Management solution is an SAP® certified mobile solution and is available on the SAP Store.

“It is a distinct honor and also a sense of accomplishment to win this years’ 2014 SAP mobile app challenge.” said Hari P. Kamineni, CEO and Co-Founder, at Innovapptive Inc. “In 2013, we were disappointed to finish runners up in two categories of the SAP mobile app challenge and our product development teams were extremely determined for the last 12 months to win the 2014 SAP mobile app challenge. We are glad that all our hard work and sleepless nights have been recognized and honored. We dedicate this accomplishment to our entire products team.”

Innovapptive will receive this award at SAP TechEd & D-code 2014, in Berlin, Germany on Tuesday, November 11th. During this festive event in Berlin, Germany, there will be performances by SAP Mentors and Jam Band, followed by the award ceremony. Innovapptive and other finalists will also demonstrate the winning mobile applications on Wednesday, November 12th at the special interest activity “Go Mobile! Live: The 2014 Mobile Challenge Finalists.”

Innovapptive Inc., a 2014 SAP® Pinnacle Awards Finalist within the category “Application Development Partner of the Year”. Innovapptive focuses on achieving “Instant Mobilization” by accelerating customer’s time to market and value for their SAP mobile deployments.

About Innovapptive

Innovapptive is an SAP mobile application development and services partner, a provider of a cloud based mobile application management platform, 30+ SAP-certified mobile apps, and a 2014 SAP Pinnacle Award finalist. Innovapptive offers an array of SAP Mobile products and services that accelerates customer’s time to market and value of their SAP mobile deployments. Innovapptive’s products, the mPower™ App store, a cloud based mobile application management solution and the mPower™ App Suite, prepackaged with an SAP certified add on, allow customers to achieve infinite number of customization through simple SAP configurations. The mPower™ App Suite and the mPower™ App Store provides customers a comprehensive portfolio of end-to-end mobile solutions to instantly take their enterprise mobile. The team at Innovapptive brings a unique and unparalleled combination of SAP, mobile, and industry experience and have transformed large global 2000 customers such as MARS Chocolate, Wrigley’s, AMGEN, ATOS International, Forest City Enterprises, KAUST, Semperian, EBY-Brown, Lord Corporation, and Vallourec USA Corp to name a few.

SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

Transform Retail Industry Order Fulfillment with Mobile Retail Inventory Management Solutions

With over 4 billion devices in the world, which is half the population of the world, Smartphones and Tablets have laid the foundation for us to stay interconnected, make intelligent decisions and stay integrated. This technology disruption has driven a behavioral change in the way we expect our day-to-day life to function. This includes our personal life and at our work place. Since the advent of smartphones and tablets, the retail industry has been focused on empowering their consumers through innovative mobile solutions, leaving behind their employees, who play an equally important role while interfacing with these customers.

The cost of the amount of time employees spend trying to satisfy shoppers who ask about a specific out-of-stock situation is approximately $800 per week. The corollary for shoppers is the amount of time spent waiting for resolution that could be spent more productively for the retailer in shopping – an estimated 20% of the average time for a shopping trip.

Using mobile technology, smartphones and tablets, the retail industry can avoid such situations and better manage their inventory by empowering their employees to increase overall profitability of a retail chain.

Retailers can now use mobile solutions for insight driven inventory management and move away from the reactive process of the past and drive more proactive inventory management. The benefits of using a mobile inventory management solution can be impressive and result in substantial savings in cost of goods sold and a marked increase in gross margin revenue on inventory (GMROI).

Mobile Retail Inventory Management Solution Benefits

1. REDUCE RETAIL OUT-OF-STOCK AND OVERSTOCK SITUATION

Retail shoppers will no longer need to wait in order to resolve an out-of-stock situation. Retail store employees can use their mobile phones to do a quick look up of stock availability at the time of customer inquiry. In addition, Store employees can firm their planned orders anywhere in the store, to decrease their order to shelf time, and avoid an out-of-stock situation.

2. STREAMLINE RETAIL FULFILLMENT WITH MOBILE STOCK MOVEMENTS

Retail fulfill management is the process of recording and ordering the movement of stock around the company and also managing customer deliveries and stock returns. For a retailer engaged in ecommerce business, it is imperative that your available stock information is accurate; avoiding any stock related embarrassments or delayed deliveries. A Mobile Stock movement solution lets you manage receiving and issuing of your stock at the point of receipt or issue without investing in heavy barcode readers, with 3^rd party interface integration to your ERP system.

3. STREAMLINE ONLINE ORDER FULFILLMENT BY BATCH PRINTING PACKING SLIPS OVER-THE-AIR

For retailers: Retailers have many options when selling their products online. However, seamless and streamlined shipment of online order fulfillment and warehouse-to-warehouse stock movement can be cumbersome when you have to print these shipping lables/packing slips from a desktop and then process these orders one by one. A Mobile Solution that provides the platform to view all your open sales orders, batch print your packing slips, UPS, Fedex or DHL labels anywhere, anytime can dramatically streamline your order fulfillment process. In addition, being able to notify your customer of the shipment with a single click will transform your online order fulfillment process.

4. MINIMIZE INVOICE EXCEPTION SCENARIOS

In retail industry 31% of invoices get blocked due to untimely goods receipts in the system. This introduces tremendous inefficiency into the Procure-to-Pay lifecycle and decreases employee productivity. Based on a study conducted by OB10, 1 million annual invoices require 175 FTEs to handle invoice exceptions. A detailed case study conducted by Innovapptive indicates that proactive blocked invoice resolution can potentially reduce 20% of FTEs which is equivalent to $1.5M savings. Proactive push notifications to create a Goods Receipt in seconds anywhere, anytime and a Mobile Universal Approvals solution on your Retail Employees smartphone to increase your overall bottom-line.

Innovapptive’s mStockMovements™ and mWorkList™ streamlines your order fulfillment process, avoid out-of-stock, over stock situations and reduces overall cost of goods sold to increase retail industries bottom-line. Learn more about these solutions and download the full demo version of these apps here -

Agile Scrum Methodology for Mobile Apps

Scrum Introduction

Scrum is the most commonly used agile framework for mobile development. Scrum uses “flexible”  strategy where customer has more transparency on the current  progress  of the project and customer can even change the project execution plan in the middle of the project according to the business values which is not possible with traditional/sequential approach. Scrum makes progress in a series of sprints which are time boxed for a month or less than a month. At the end of the every sprint, a sprint review is conducted during which the team demonstrates the new functionality to the product Owner, stakeholders and to the customer.

Scrum framework provides “Change Anytime Strategy” so still you can be a leader in your domain as your mobile app might provide latest technology and because of few other reasons.

Scrum Roles

Product Owner

The Product Owner is responsible for managing the Product Backlog, writing user stories and is the voice of the customer. Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product and work of development team. Product owner ensures that Product Backlog is visible to all and confirms what Scrum team will do in the next sprint.

Development Team

Development team is responsible for delivering a potentially releasable “Increment of Done Product” at the end of each sprint. The work done by Development team is self organizing, cross functional (analyses, design, develop, test, technical communication, document, etc.).

Scrum Master

Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that Scrum is understood bythe entire team and for removing any hurdles which might affect sprint goal/deadlines. Scrum Master helps in coaching  agility to the Product Owner and to the development team.

Scrum Meetings

Sprint Planning Meeting

Sprint Planning Meeting is time boxed to eight hours for one month sprint  and the meeting duration should be shorter for the shorter sprint. In the meeting we discuss what work to be done in this sprint and how we can get this work done.

Daily Standup Meeting

Daily Standup Meeting is timeboxed to 15-20 mins for the Development team to create a plan for the next 24 hours. During this meeting each Development team member explains :

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What are the blockers in my way?

Sprint Review Meeting

Sprint Review Meeting is time boxed to 4 hours for one month sprint and meeting duration should be shorter for the shorter sprint. During this meeting the Scrum Team and stakeholders collaborate about what was “Done” and what has not been done in sprint. The result of Sprint Review Meeting defines the items we should add in the next sprint from the Product Backlog.

Sprint Retrospective Meeting

Sprint Retrospective Meeting is time boxed to 3 hours for one month sprint and should be shorter for the shorter sprint. Sprint Review Meeting held’s after the Sprint Review meeting and prior to the next Sprint Planning Meeting. During this meeting each team member is asked to identify specific things team should:

1. What we should start doing?
2. What we should stop doing?
3. What we should continue doing?

Scrum Artifacts

Product Backlog

Product Backlog in an list of  user stories(requirements) which is maintained for the  development. Product Backlog is dynamic and constantly changes to identify what the app needs to be appropriate, competitive and useful. Product Backlog is often ordered by value, risk, priority and necessity, and high priority items gets immediate development activities over lower priority items.

Sprint Backlog

Sprint Backlog is a list of selected items from the Product Backlog for the Sprint. Sprint Backlog makes visible all of the work that Development identifies as necessary to meet the Sprint goal. Once sprint tasks estimation is done and team is committed on sprint backlog items then we can’t add additional user story in the sprint.

Agile  Business Value /  Waterfall

  Why does it make sense to use Scrum Methodology for Mobile Apps?

1. Agile development fits in the evolving nature of mobility
2. After completion of the project Agile development delivers an mobile app which might easily fit in your current business requirements
3. Agile development makes more stable and less buggy mobile app
4. In Agile development It’s easier to implement the new features and enhancements which are mentioned in customer feedback.

Thanks for your time to read this blog. Feel free to post your comments or questions.

Multi-Platform Mobile App Screen Design

We all know how bothersome multi-platform mobile app formatting can get. Each platform is unique and exhibits different features, capabilities and behaviour. But then, multi-platform apps are truly “in” today. So – YOU – as the developer, need to find solutions to develop the best cross-formatted apps, without exhausting all your resources on developing for just a couple of platforms at one time.

Fortunately for you, there are some really great multi-platform developer tools in the market today, using which you can easily achieve your aim. Here is an Appcelerator dev tool for cross-formatting mobile applications. You can find the platform tutorials in this Appcelerator link .

The Titanium Development Platform from Appcelerator, which incidentally has a formidable fan following in Twitter, aids the development of native mobile, tablet and desktop apps via web programming languages such as HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby and Python. It now powers over a 1,000 native apps per month. The best thing about Titanium is that if gives users easy access to over 300 APIs and location information.

Additionally, Appcelerator also offers customizable metrics for actions and events. Apps can be totally hardware-based and all app data can be stored either in the cloud or on the device.

Developers of mobile applications know exactly how difficult and frustrating app coding can sometimes get. The problem intensifies further while writing code for multi-platform mobile applications. Each mobile platform, such as Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, iPhone, iPad and so on, has its own set of features. If designing across diverse devices is a challenge, it is even more so for those who create applications which should be portable across multiple platforms. How can you develop and design for such varied device platforms?

Here, I explain how to design a  enterprise mobile app screens in easier way across all the devices.

Start off by dividing the screen into number of views

• First view contains company logo  with a border.
• Second View contains application name and the simple description of the application.
• Third view contains the buttons.
• The last view is the bottom view be careful here I am not numbering this view as four, named it as bottom view because across all the devices it should appear in the bottom of the screen.

Code:

Step 1: To create a window

Var window = Titanium.UI.createWindow();

Step 2: To create first view

Var FirstView = Ti.UI.createView({width:Ti.UI.FILL,height: ‘ 20%‘});
Var border = Ti.UI.createView({width:Ti.UI.FILL,height:’2%’});

Step 3: To create the logo image view

Var LogoImage = Ti.UI.CreateImageView(Image:’path of the image’;Width:Ti.UI.FILL,Height:’18%’});
FirstView.add(LogoImage);
FirstView.add(border);
Window.add(FirstView);

Step 4: To create second view

Var SecondView = Ti.UI.createView({width:Ti.UI.FILL,height: ‘ 30%‘});

Step 5: To create sub views of second view

Var appicationName = Ti.UI.createLabel({Title:’Innovapptive Substituition Manager’});Var applicationtag = Ti.UI.createLabel({Title:’write the data from the screen’,
Top:’10dp’});
SecondView.add(applicationname);
SecondView.add(applicaationtag);
Window.add(SecondView);

Step 6: To create third view

Var ThirdView = Ti.UI.createView({width:Ti.UI.FILL,height: ‘ 40%‘});

Step 7: To create sub views of third view

Var demoButton = Ti.UI.createButton({title:’DemoApplication’});
Var setupButton = Ti.UI.createButton({title:’Setup Connection’,Top:’15dp’});
ThirdView.add(demoButton);ThidView.add(setupButton);
Window.add(ThirdView);

Step 8: To create bottom view

Var bottomBorder = Ti.UI.createView({width:Ti.UI.FILL,height:’10dp’,Bottom:’2dp’});
Window.add(bottomBorder);
new window().open();

Copy the source code into your work space run the application in any device and see the screen look and feel is same as  above screen .

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

Innovapptive Partners with Samsung Electronics To Deliver mPower™ SAP Certified Mobile Apps on Samsung Android Devices

Innovapptive and Samsung Electronics partner to provide compelling enterprise mobility solutions by providing Innovapptive’s portfolio of the mPower™ AppSuite on Samsung Android smartphones and tablets. Innovapptive intends to stretch its Android market by partnering with Samsung Electronics through their Samsung Enterprise Alliance Program (SEAP). The SEAP program allows Innovapptive to partner with Samsung and extend its reach into the Android enterprise market by building better enterprise mobile solutions.

Innovapptive’s partnership with Samsung benefits global 2000 customers who intend to excel in business through enterprise mobility. This partnership provides an assurance to customers who look at global standards as a criterion for choosing pre-packaged enterprise mobility products, supporting their enterprise or personal Android mobile devices. Innovapptive Inc.’s core product offering, the mPower™ Apps Suite, ensures quality through rigorous SAP certification. Partnering with Samsung, Innovapptive is now able to deliver its mPower™ SAP certified mobile apps on Samsung Android devices for customers looking to jump start into enterprise mobility solutions. Combining Samsung Mobile devices, Innovapptive’s mPower™ Apps Suite and Innovapptive’s SAP qualified rapid deployment solutions; enterprises are now able to mobilize their workforce within 4 to 6 weeks.

Innovapptive with its wide range of product and service offerings, in combination with the SEAP partnership, can now offer its Android based applications to a wider audience base,” said Sri Karthik, Senior Vice President - Sales and Marketing, Innovapptive Inc. This partnership furnishes true evidence to Innovapptive’s flourishing and influential enterprise mobility presence and dedication to help provide cost effective and high business value solutions to our customers.

"Innovapptive’s global reach is more enhanced with Samsung’s partnership and the synergies shared through the partnership help Innovapptive and Samsung customers to rapidly mobilize their workforce,” said Sundeep V. Ravande, President & Co-Founder, Innovapptive Inc.

Innovapptive is constantly expanding its mPower Apps suite focused on industry specific solutions. The full list of Innovapptive’s enterprise mobility products and service offerings can be found at http://www.innovapptive.com. For more information regarding, please call 1 (713) 300-3762 or email Innovapptive directly at info(at)innovapptive(dot)com.

About Innovapptive

Innovapptive Inc. is an SAP Certified partner specializing in Mobile application management services in several SAP Modules and SAP Mobility by offering a wide range of SAP certified mobile apps and professional services to develop your enterprise mobility strategy, Use case Analysis, rapid deployment of mobile apps, custom mobile app development, consulting and staff augmentation. Innovapptive’s team of SAP and Mobile professionals bring an unparalleled and a unique combination of SAP, Mobile and industry experience to rapidly mobilize your enterprise with radical and transformative mobile solutions.