“As a long-term partner, Soliant Consulting really understands our business. Once again, they've delivered a great product with our needs and vision in mind.”

Real-Time Data Served Up in Style on the iPhone

In the competitive world of luxury kitchen appliances, Purcell Murray stands out as one of the premier distributors in North America. When Managing Director Matt Murray decided he needed to provide real-time information on product availability to their dealer network, Soliant Consulting delivered a high-performance iPhone app, giving Purcell Murray's dealers a powerful mobile tool.

Purcell Murray markets, sells and distributes the finest names in European and American appliance brands, including Bertazzoni, Bosch, Gaggenau and Thermador. If you have your sights set on a unique La Cornue range that is hand-built in France, Purcell Murray has the exclusive rights to distribute it throughout North America.

After 30 years in business, Purcell Murray takes pride in their solid dealer relationships that have been built on trust and credibility. This is thanks to the extra efforts taken to ensure that dealers have the service and tools they need to sell and deliver products to their clients, including two state-of-the-art showrooms totaling 21,000 square feet and cooking classes to teach people how to use their new appliances.

Warehouses in Northern and Southern California hold more than 300,000 square feet of products and accessories in a vast array of sizes and brands, creating the need to manage a great deal of information about stock.

Previously, Soliant Consulting worked with Purcell Murray to create a web-based system by which dealers can easily access up-to-the-minute status on stock in the warehouses through the existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) information system. With this system in place, dealers can access real-time information on all of the product lines and their availability.

Dealers, though, aren't always in the office when a call comes in. Immediate access to information on the fly would go further toward providing excellent service and satisfying their customers' questions.

Matt Murray conceived of an iPhone application that would allow dealers to check real-time information on items in stock, products in transit, and model numbers available. Armed with this vital information, dealers can instantly help their clients by confirming details or suggesting alternatives available within the timeline of the kitchen build.

Purcell Murray turned to their long-time partner Soliant Consulting to help them build the mobile application. The success of previous projects came from Soliant's deep understanding of Purcell Murray's business, brand and data.

Critical to the application was the need for the interface to have the same visual aesthetic as the high-quality products that Purcell Murray sells. The iPhone application also had to be easy and straightforward to use to accommodate people of various technical skill levels. Soliant worked through several design concepts with Purcell Murray and fine-tuned the application interface to match the exclusivity of their product line.

Soliant developed the Purcell Murray mobile application with native tools and widgets in Objective-C and the Apple Cocoa API from the iPhone software development kit to keep costs in line with the project's budget.

Soliant's technical team oversaw the process of getting the data to the application. The goal was to connect the queries from the iPhone, which are received in XML, with the data in Purcell Murray's ERP system. All of the product information from two warehouses in California, including delivery status, is contained in an SQL database. Soliant used PHP to create a bridge for data to flow from this server to the iPhone app.

The primary challenge facing the Soliant team was performance. Live, real-time searches against a large database in a mobile setting can bog down speed and overload a device. Soliant overcame these obstacles with query optimization, design and caching solutions to produce a high-performance iPhone app.

Purcell Murray is the first in their market to offer a mobile application, setting a new standard for the industry. It is available free of charge in the iPhone App Store, though users need a dealer login to access data.

By making their full catalogue of product information and time-sensitive data available on-demand through iPhones, Purcell Murray has taken the extra step to make life easier for their dealers by giving them service and tools that are unmatched in the industry. It's one more reason for dealers to turn to Purcell Murray first.

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