Four field roles, one app, zero paper.
Coromandel International ran marketing visits, agronomy support, and warehouse orders on paper and phone calls. We built one React Native app that gives every role in the field the screens for its job, synced live with the systems behind it.
Four different jobs, forced through the same manual process.
Coromandel International works across the farming value chain, and its field workforce reflects that: marketing officers meeting dealers, agronomists supporting farmers, project trainees learning territories, and warehouse staff managing orders. Four genuinely different jobs.
All four ran manually. Visit reports were written up later, if at all. Agronomy advice lived in individual notebooks. Warehouse orders moved on phone calls and were keyed in afterwards, with the errors that implies. Management's view of the field was days old by the time it was compiled, and decisions were made on it anyway.
The brief was one mobile app for everyone, but the trap in that brief is obvious: one app designed for the average user serves nobody. A marketing officer's day and a warehouse agent's day have almost nothing in common. So we didn't start with the app. We started with the days.
Every role, off paper.
Designed around the day, not the org chart.
We ran in-depth sessions with people in every role, mapping the actual tasks in an actual day: what a marketing officer needs standing in front of a dealer, what a warehouse agent needs at the loading bay. The user journey for each designation was mapped before anything was designed.
One app, four experiences. Each employee logs in and sees only the features for their role. That is a security decision and a usability decision at once: less to learn, less to get wrong, nothing on screen that doesn't belong to the job.
The app integrates with the client's back-office systems for real-time data synchronisation. Field staff update progress, pull product information, and collaborate on the go. An order placed in the field is in the warehouse queue before the sales visit ends.
Two full cycles of prototyping and field testing before rollout, with feedback from end users folded into each revision, and QA across devices and OS versions. This is why adoption held: over 90% of field users were active weekly within the first quarter.
The field and the warehouse, finally on the same system.
Order processing at the warehouse is 60% faster now that orders arrive structured from the field instead of by phone, and fulfilment moved with it. Inventory, order tracking, and deliveries run through the app, which shows up directly in customer satisfaction.
Management reporting on visits, orders, and territory performance is available the same day instead of compiled over days, if it existed at all. Reporting and analytics across performance metrics, market trends, and customer behaviour now inform decisions that used to be made on instinct.
And the softer change is the one the client mentions first: marketing officers reach dealers with timely updates and product information from inside the app, and the whole field force works as one connected team across departments and geographies rather than a set of individuals with notebooks.
Four roles, one app. The field finally works from the same system as the warehouse.
- React Native
- iOS + Android
- One codebase
- Offline-tolerant
- Role-based logins
- Four role experiences
- Feature permissions
- Back-office sync
- Real-time data
- Inventory & orders
- Iterative prototyping
- Field user testing
- Cross-device QA
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