Mobile development is not the next big thing anymore, it is THE big thing today. And as you may already know, Oracle APEX is ready to take on the challenge of creating mobile business solutions.
We at iAdvise already started to experiment with mobile application development in APEX 4.0, but off course this was not the ideal environment yet. Since APEX 4.1 you can declaratively create mobile applications with jQuery mobile, and with the latest release (4.2) it’s really starting to lift off. You can even declaratively build responsive applications.
In May 2012 we gave a seminar about mobile development, and since then we successfully developed several mobile solutions for our clients. Below you can find a demo of an application we created for one of our most valued customers, New Holland Tractor Ltd.
New Holland Tractor Ltd
About New Holland: Since 1895, New Holland is committed to providing solutions that improve farming efficiency and productivity.
New Holland offers cash crop producers, livestock farmers, contractors, vineyards and groundcare professionals the largest choice of easy-to-operate tractors, harvesters and material handling equipment.
New Holland complements the widest agricultural equipment offering in the world with efficient Parts and Service support and a range of tailored financial services from a specialist in agriculture. Setting themselves the highest standards in quality and service, is part of the culture of New Holland, part of the DNA of New Holland. The plant in Antwerp (New Holland Tractor Limited) with some 1,000 employees, is a major manufacturing unit of tractor parts such as rear axles and drive systems.
Mobile application
New Holland Tractor requested a mobile solution to let their workers use checklists at the quality gates of the assembly lines in the plant.
In the past they had to manage all these checklists by hand. For each checklist, a paper form had to be filled out after which it had to be processed by hand. This created a lot of overhead and it was very easy to make errors.
The application had to be developed in Oracle APEX 4.1 and had to be super user-friendly. The result is a simple, yet elegant application.
Usability
At iAdvise we invest a lot to make our applications user-friendly. For this project we started off by designing mockups that were used as guidelines during the development phase, those helped us to create a very simple and efficient application.
For the workers of New Holland Tractor, this solution was a huge improvement. Now that the checklists are processed automatically, it’s very easy to analyze the production process and there’s less room for errors, hence it further increased both productivity and efficiency at the assembly lines.
We feel that mobile development with APEX is really kicking off and the APEX development team is on the right track to make APEX a mobile enabled development environment.
Exciting times are coming!
