Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Currently, sales reps in many companies rely on simple note-taking and observation in the field. Usually, thesynchronization of these notes with other sales reps and the manager does not take place until at the end of theday, or possibly later. With the advances in mobile computing and high-speed persistent networks, sales repscould be providing updates in real-time to other sales reps and their managers. Furthermore, criticalinstructions could also be relayed to the field sales rep immediately, thereby avoiding costly delays byscheduling another visit to the site at a later date.Encore Market Engagement is interested in exploring two areas in this applied research project - both of whichrely on the use of mobile devices.- Maximizing sales reps' in-car time for business purposes: Encore's clients currently use a data acquisition andsales force automation tool called EnCompass for the iPad. The goal of this part of the research is to augmentEnCompass with the modules to help sales reps be more productive while in transit. For example, whiledriving, a text-to-speech module reads the status and summary of the next sales call to the sales rep through thecar's audio system.- Sales rep routing algorithm: An algorithm is needed to generate routing schedules for sales reps and todynamically adjust their schedules if necessary (e.g., a high priority issue needs to be addressed). These newschedules are pushed to all of the sales reps' iPads that need the update. The solution to this problem willinvolve cloud computing and mobile computing resources.