Case Study - An offline-first ERP system for a large retail company

Overview

Our client is a Nigerian retail company that sells textiles to consumers and wholesalers. It has seven locations both inside and outside of the state of Kano. They desired a speedier checkout process, 100% system uptime, and the capacity to oversee all sales across all of their branches in one location in order to give their customers an improved shopping experience.

Considering that the bulk of their staff were familiar with the Windows OS, they sought a desktop application. They anticipate the system to have the checkout feature as well as spending management, ACL capabilities, accounting features, and reporting.

Having considered several options, Mudatex hired a company that, eventually, subcontracted the project to Starfolk to provide application development services for the project due to our expertise in the design, implementation, and deployment of desktop applications.

Solution

Our team was solely responsible for the design and delivery of the ERP system. To get around connectivity problems and guarantee maximum availability, we created a desktop application designed to operate offline as well as online. To achieve this, the application maintained two databases—a local and a remote one—that were in constant communication with each other.

A user can boot up the application without an internet connection and make changes to records. Once, internet connection is restored, these changes will be synced up to the remote database automatically.

Disclaimer: We cannot share screenshots of the actual system or even provide in-depth information on the project due to the non-disclosure agreement we signed with the customer.

What we did