The Client is a privately held manufacturer of professional construction tools and fastening systems, with a growing software division. At the time of this engagement in 2021, the Client employed over 30,000 people working out of local offices in 120 countries.
Sales teams in different countries followed different processes. Product features, regional capabilities, and competitor pricing lived in spreadsheets that headquarters distributed as master files, which local offices then translated and updated by hand. Field reps meeting customers on job sites frequently had no reliable access to the technical data and pricing they needed, because connectivity there was limited or absent.
Net Solutions worked with the Client across four connected phases, and the distinguishing feature of the engagement is that the same partner did the research and built the software it pointed to. A joint Android scheduling app proved the working model. A multi-country field research program produced a validated global sales process and prototype. A web-based Product Matrix System replaced the spreadsheets with a live, multilingual, two-way repository. An API and companion Android app then pushed that data into the hands of field reps who could use it whether or not they had a signal.
The result was a single technology backbone for global sales, field operations, and product management, built by a team that had sat with the people who would use it.
Rapid international growth had left the manufacturer operating as a set of independent regional territories rather than one enterprise. Local autonomy had powered the expansion, and then it started to cost them. Headquarters had no real-time view into branch activity, and field teams had no tooling capable of executing a single global strategy.
Local offices ran autonomously with no shared scheduling tool and no consistent way to coordinate calendars across offices or align regional teams with headquarters.
Every regional sales team had grown its own workflow. The customer experience varied by geography, brand discipline was uneven, and there was no mechanism for moving a sales approach that worked in one office to any other office.
Product features, regional capabilities, and competitor pricing sat in spreadsheet databases maintained by hand. Keeping dozens of markets synchronized and accurate through distributed master files was slow and error-prone by design.
Reps needed technical product information and pricing at the moment of the customer conversation, and those conversations happened on construction sites where internet access was unreliable.
Standardizing software across tens of thousands of employees in more than 100 countries was primarily a change-management problem. A rigid system imposed from headquarters without understanding local field reality would have been rejected by the branches on arrival.
Net Solutions worked research-first, then carried that research into code.
The engagement deliberately started small. Net Solutions embedded with the Client’s own development team on a focused internal scheduling application, establishing a feedback-led delivery model and earning the credibility for a larger mandate. With that in place, a dedicated UX team was deployed to study global sales operations in depth: contextual inquiry into one European country’s sales operations as a base case, then stakeholder interviews, ethnographic observation, and empathy mapping across multiple countries to construct a comprehensive user journey map.
What happened after the research is the part that mattered most. Rather than delivering findings and stepping away, the same partner engineered the platform those findings specified. Prototypes, web platform capabilities, and mobile sync behavior were all shaped by direct feedback from field sales reps and local office staff, and every design and engineering decision traced back to observed user behavior rather than an assumption formed at headquarters.
A connected, multi-phase technology ecosystem, delivered over time, with each phase informed by the results of the one before it.
Android developers worked alongside the Client’s existing development team to build a mobile scheduling application linked directly to the enterprise CRM. Color-coded colleague availability made cross-office meeting coordination straightforward, and the joint team iterated on the app using feedback from internal users. This phase built the working relationship that unlocked everything that followed.
UX specialists ran qualitative field research with the Client’s project team, beginning with contextual inquiry into one country’s sales operations as a baseline and extending to interviews across multiple international sales regions. The team documented workflows region by region, built empathy maps for reps and customers, and assembled a global user journey map that exposed exactly where processes diverged.
That research produced a prototype for a universal sales application: standardized where standardization served the customer, flexible where local practice was earning results, and built with a mechanism for regions to exchange insights instead of rediscovering them. Designs were validated with field reps across geographies before anything was finalized.
The web-based Product Matrix System retired the spreadsheets. It consolidated product details from global headquarters and local offices into one repository and was engineered to respect how the organization actually worked:
The platform was extended through an API into a companion mobile application for field sales reps. Driven by ongoing user feedback, the engineering team built selective synchronization that stored and refreshed only the language and regional datasets relevant to each individual rep. The payload stayed small, the sync stayed fast, and the app kept working on job sites with limited or zero connectivity.
Replacing manual, legacy workflows with a connected digital ecosystem gave the Client a scalable foundation for global sales, field operations, and product management.
Office-by-office scheduling was replaced by one app used across global teams. Reps gained real-time visibility into colleague availability across regions, which accelerated meeting coordination and removed administrative friction.
Region-specific tactics gave way to a standardized, research-backed framework. Grounded in multi-market field research, the new process established consistent brand discipline and shared operational practice across countries without stripping out regional flexibility.
The Product Matrix System turned a fragile, localized spreadsheet process into a live, two-way system. Time to sync regional product and competitor pricing data dropped from days to near real-time, cross-country data discrepancies were eliminated, and resellers gained instant access to current information.
Background synchronization in the companion Android app put real-time product matrices, specifications, and regional pricing in reps’ hands on remote job sites, connectivity or not.
The quality of delivery on each phase led directly to the next mandate, turning a single focused project into a multi-workstream relationship spanning research, design, and engineering.
What set Net Solutions apart was not just what we built, but how we partnered to build it, from earning trust early to designing for real-world complexity, scale, and long-term growth.
Net Solutions proved its capability on a focused first project, embedded inside the Client’s own team, before being trusted with the sales process redesign and the Product Matrix System.
The sales process redesign rested on interviews and journey mapping across multiple countries, not on assumptions about what a standard process ought to look like.
The team that ran contextual inquiry in the field also wrote the Android code and designed the API. Nothing was lost in a handoff, because there was no handoff.
Multilingual, two-way, and offline-capable from the outset, because a system used in 120 countries has to work everywhere, not just at headquarters.
Low bandwidth, device fragmentation, and unreliable connectivity were treated as core requirements rather than edge cases.
These figures reflect the Client’s global scale and continued growth following the technology implementations, and the durability of the digital foundations Net Solutions helped build.
With sales teams operating independently across 120 countries, the company had no shared scheduling tool, no consistent sales process, and no reliable way to keep product and competitor pricing data current. That data lived in spreadsheets distributed from headquarters and updated by hand in each region, and field reps often could not access it at all on job sites with poor connectivity.
Both, and that was the point. Net Solutions ran the field research (contextual inquiry, stakeholder interviews, empathy mapping, journey documentation across multiple countries) and then engineered what the research specified: a CRM-linked Android scheduling app, a multilingual web-based Product Matrix System, an API, and an offline-capable companion mobile app.
A web-based product information platform that replaced spreadsheet databases. It kept corporate content distinct from regional entries, supported multi-language translation for local branches, allowed two-way updates so regional data flowed upstream to global databases, and let administrators grant selected third-party resellers controlled access.
The companion Android app uses selective synchronization. It stores and refreshes only the specific language and regional datasets relevant to each individual rep rather than the entire global matrix, keeping the local dataset small enough to sync quickly and available in full when the rep is offline on a job site.
In four connected phases, each one commissioned on the strength of the last: an internal scheduling app built jointly with the Client’s development team, a field-researched global sales process framework and prototype, the multilingual Product Matrix System, and the API plus offline-capable companion mobile app.
By researching before designing. The team observed and interviewed sales staff in multiple countries to learn how selling actually worked locally, then standardized only what genuinely benefited from consistency while preserving regional flexibility and building a channel for regions to share what worked. Designs were validated with field reps before being finalized.
Synchronization of regional product and competitor pricing data moved from days to near real-time, cross-country data discrepancies were eliminated, cross-office meeting coordination was streamlined through shared availability visibility, and field reps gained continuous access to product and pricing data regardless of connectivity.
Yes. This engagement was engineered for exactly those constraints, with selective data sync, lightweight regional payloads, and offline-first behavior on Android designed in from the start rather than retrofitted.
If your regional teams each have their own playbook, your product and pricing data still moves by spreadsheet, or your field reps go dark the moment they lose signal, these are solvable engineering problems. We have solved them at the scale of 120 countries. Talk to our team.
Results matter. Discover how our customized solutions have delivered measurable business outcomes for clients across various industries. Each case study highlights the strategic impact of our work, turning challenges into opportunities for growth.
Ask Sol anything about digital products, AI, engineering, or growth, and get answers drawn from years of Net Solutions thinking and experience.