Overview
Commercial field sales representatives frequently visit retail customers, distribution warehouses, and remote commercial sites where cellular connectivity is intermittent or entirely unavailable. In these field environments, delaying price quotes or relying on manual calculations leads to lost deals and pricing disputes.
As a Technology Lead at Infosys from November 2019 to January 2021, I led technical design and engineering delivery for an Android solution integrated with Salesforce, allowing sales representatives to accurately price orders, calculate tier-based discounts, and validate contractual promotions completely offline.
1. Business Need
Commercial field sales operations required a dependable digital tool to empower on-site commercial transactions:
- Uninterrupted Order Quoting: Field sales teams needed to generate binding order quotes and evaluate promotion eligibility on-site without waiting for a mobile data connection.
- Complex Multi-Tier Pricing Logic: Pricing structures involved layered business rules: volume tier discounts, customer segment agreements, regional promotional bundles, and temporal contract clauses.
- Salesforce Workflow Alignment: While execution occurred offline, the resulting quotes and orders needed to sync seamlessly into existing corporate Salesforce CRM pipelines upon reconnection.
- Elimination of Calculation Errors: Replacing manual spreadsheets and paper rate-cards with an automated, authoritative calculation engine built directly into the mobile application.
2. Constraints
The project presented demanding algorithmic and data storage constraints:
- Strict Offline Determinism: Every pricing combination, discount exclusion, and tax rule had to evaluate identically offline as it would on the cloud Salesforce engine.
- Local Database Volume & Performance: Storing thousands of SKU definitions, pricing tiers, and customer profile records locally within SQLite while maintaining sub-second calculation response times.
- Memory & Battery Efficiency: Field representatives used mobile devices for extended shifts without recharge opportunities, requiring lean memory usage and zero unneeded background polling.
- Synchronization & Conflict Handling: Managing data versioning between locally modified orders and remote Salesforce updates to prevent data overwrite when connectivity resumed.
3. My Contributions
Throughout the engagement lifecycle, my core contributions included:
- Requirements Discovery Workshops: Participated actively in client workshops with business analysts and Salesforce architects to map intricate commercial pricing workflows into clear software requirements.
- Technical Architecture & Data Modeling: Architected the local data layer using Kotlin and Room, designing normalized relational schemas and optimized database indices for high-speed multi-criteria lookups.
- Offline Pricing Engine Implementation: Engineered the deterministic business logic rules engine that computed complex volume discounts, promotional overrides, and tax calculations locally.
- Deep Debugging & Quality Governance: Conducted comprehensive edge-case testing, resolved complex synchronization anomalies, and established unit test suites validating pricing calculation accuracy.
4. What the Solution Supported
The completed Android solution delivered transformative capabilities for the commercial field organization:
- Autonomous Offline Quoting: Representatives walked onto customer sites and generated validated order quotes instantly, completely independent of wireless network availability.
- Consistent Rule Enforcement: Guaranteed that contractual discount limits and promotional bundling constraints were enforced systematically without human calculation errors.
- Seamless Cloud Reconciliation: Automatically synced queued field orders and signed agreements into the enterprise Salesforce CRM environment once network connectivity was restored.
- Enhanced Customer Transparency: Provided immediate visibility into line-item discounts and final order costs directly on the sales representative’s screen during client meetings.