Purpose and Objective
This blog is my entry to the SAP Low Code No Code Challenge, which details my experience working with the SAP AppGyver tool.
The purpose of this application to assist small business to begin their data digitalization journey and move away from manual or paper based inventory tracking
Being a firm supporter and believer in the whole area around the digitalization of data, especially in the supply chain field, I decided to act on it rather than only talk about it. Being a supply chain professional, and a non-technical coder, I always felt a little handicapped when it came to coding and building anything software and IT related. I always felt dependent on external resources for assistance and often ended up hitting a roadblock.
Digitalization of data is only the first but the foremost step towards creating a “digital twin” of any supply chain. I began exploring this interface to digitalize the data of a small liquor store located in Bangalore, India for a fellow supply chain enthusiast-turned-business owner. Pain points included the current process, which involved paper-based inventory and sales tracking that often led to mismatches in balance sheets. There were excessive, obsolete SKUs in the inventory. Finally there were erratic ordering patterns, which in turn led to negatively affecting customer service.
Once we have collected and digitized adequate data to streamline the ordering policies, understand the safety stock requirements, and reorder policies, the next step would be to bring in the freight and transportation side of the data and ultimately automate the process and assist in data-driven decision making
Link:
Link to try the application: https://inventoryanagementystem.appgyverapp.com/
Some Snippets of my application:
Prerequisites:
Design and Building:
Primary features include:
- Creation of dropdown lists, categories and sub categories of Liquor sold in the store
- Buttons and data entry field to record and store the data
- Notifications to reflect the data has been saved!
- Another page to record damages or breakages at the inbound or receiving
Connecting to Data:
I leveraged Airtable as the backend database to store all the data and information being entered through the App and created a REST API.
Multiple Native features of the device was used to record the data: For eg, camera to record the image of damages on the inbound
- Several intricate Formalae was used in order to ensure the quantities were auto populated and linked to the appropriate category and brand of items.
Experience and Feedback:
Being a core supply chain professional, apart from ETL tools like SQL and other statistical tools, coding per se and creating REST APIs were not very familiar concepts for me. Building this application using AppGyver has been the greatest learning experience for me in terms of becoming more self-sufficient, as well as having the flexibility to customize the requirements to fit the design. I was able to run a few quick iterations based on making it not only user-friendly but also intuitive.
Fortunately, the forum is filled with resources, it is quite self-explanatory and guides the user step-by-step. With Airtable I created a REST API to connect my backend data, which enabled the user to easily export to Excel and provide easier model building and visualization capabilities.
Looking forward to using Appgyver as a full replacement to full stack development and it would be great to see the enablement or compatibility of plugins to connect to a Bluetooth printer in order to make it a full functional application to solve end to end real world problems.
Happy Building !:)
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