An iPad Order Management System for Fashion Trade

The fashion industry loves the new tablets. In 2011 we noted a 38% growth of e-commerce in the italian fashion industry. A large number of brands have understood the value of mobile devices as the key channel for consumer communication. The interest of brands in applications of mobile marketing and services have made a big step forward, with an increase of 129% in 2011 (osservatori.net, 2012). This paper presents a mobile version of the Fashion OMS (Order Management System) web application. Fashion Touch is a mobile application that allows clients and company’s sales networks to process commercial orders, consult the product catalog and manage customers as the OMS web version does with the added functionality of the off-line order entering mode. To develop an effective mobile App, we started by analyzing the new web technologies for mobile applications (HTML5, CSS3, Ajax) and their relative development frameworks making a comparison with the Apple’s native programming language. We selected Titanium, a multi-platform framework for native mobile and desktop devices application development via web technologies as the best framework for our purpose. We faced issues concerning the network synchronization and studied different database solutions depending on the device hardware characteristics and performances. This paper reports every aspect of the App development until the publication on the Apple Store.