PC-based salesmen tracking and monitoring system using GPS within Metro Manila Area for Unilever Philippines

• Main Authors: Choi, Charles Dexter S., Chua, Dianne Ashley A., Ramos, Ranier Aldrick E.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2010
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/10946
• Institution: De La Salle University

Unilever Philippines is a multinational company that manufactures food, home, and personal care products. In order to sell their products, their salesmen are individually assigned to stores that they need to visit to collect orders and payments. Due to the large number of salesmen, the company has difficulty in keeping track of every salesman that they deploy. Currently, their salesmen are equipped with PDA phones which they use for sales transactions. This study aims to create a system that will enable supervisors to monitor and track their salesmen using GPS technology alongside their PDA phones. Every time they make a transaction, their location is acquired through the built-in GPS in their mobile phones and is sent to the monitoring application by SMS. The tracking and monitoring system consist of hardware and software components. Hardware components include a GPS capable PDA phone for obtaining the salesmen's coordinates, a GSM modem for receiving SMS messages that contain the coordinates, and a PC for hosting the website, the database, and the GSM modem. For the software components, three programs were written. One is the mobile phone application written in C# for the Windows Mobile 6.x Platform, which is responsible for obtaining the salesmen's location. The second is the GSM module manager, written in Java, that receives location data, and the third is a web application, written in Groovy, that enables viewing of information through a website. The system used MySQL for the database, Apache Tomcat 6 for the webserver, and Google Maps for the digital map.