2006 Channel Elite Awards
Gold Winners: Best Mid-Market Solutions: FingertipWare and OnX
11/22/2006 2:48:00 PM By: Buket Oktem
Best Mid-Market Solutions: FingertipWareCustom mobile solution wins
FingertipWare co-founders Michael Flynn and Tim Grimes were both surprised and relieved when the company's name was announced as the gold winner for Best Mid-Market Solution.
“Whether you win or lose, it's a stressful moment,” said Flynn.
The three-year-old company based in Willowdale, Ont., won for a custom mobile workforce solution that helped Gencor, a farmer- directed artificial insemination cooperative for cattle, eliminate over 17,000 man hours of unproductive duplicate data entry per year.
“We had to develop an application that runs locally on a Pocket PC-Windows Mobile 2003 device with all the data, client records, inventory and cattle information,” said Flynn.
The customized Windows Mobile application synchronizes the information onto the handheld devices, allows users to build orders offline and submit orders once they are connected online, he explained.
In addition, the FingertipWare system provides dispatching, automated order taking, payment and breeding service processing.
Over 70 sales and service personnel are using the product, which is fully integrated with Gencor's Oracle platform, accounting and order management system.
The mobile solution, which took 12 months to build and four months to deploy, uses Audiovox PPC-6600 Pocket PC phones on the Bell Mobility network and PrintekMobile MtP300LP Bluetooth mobile thermal printers.
Based in Guelph, Ont., Gencor has a mobile workforce that meets over 6,000 active members and services over 223,000 cows each year in a territory that spans over 729,000 square kilometers.
Breeding efficiency
Prior to FingertipWare's solution, Gencor's field technicians would hand write the delivery and breeding receipts for farmers, which was both time consuming and prone to error, said Bill Seegmiller, director of field division at Gencor.
In the solution provider's submission to CEA judges, Seegmiller said “we are able to add more information to the documents, they take less time to produce and they're readable.”
According to Flynn, the Windows Mobile platform is beginning to garner greater interest than Palm and BlackBerry devices.
“It's becoming the prolific device of choice especially for business people because the richness of its applications is substantial,” said Flynn.
“Since Microsoft supports the SQL Server component on handhelds, there are rich synchronization capabilities, graphical user interface capabilities and an extensive processor and memory capacity which makes the platform more than capable of delivering everything that's required for a true enterprise integration system like a Gencor app.”
After the CEA awards, FingertipWare created an e-mail marketing campaign announcing the company's gold win to over 400 contacts.
Flynn and Grimes already have two solutions in mind for next year's CEA submissions. “One involves a virtual warehouse system for Ontario's largest food charity network,” he said. Sign up for our Computer Dealer News Newsletter
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