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CASE STUDY: Mars Inc. Mobile App

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*This was an original case study created by Xamarin in collaboration with Fortuitas. 

What Is Xamarin?

Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise mobile development and quality. Over one million developers use Xamarin to accelerate the creation and testing of mission-critical consumer and enterprise apps. Xamarin powers mobile development for more than 100 of the Fortune 500 companies with a global customer base spanning 150 countries. Xamarin is a Visionary in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant Report for Mobile Application Development Platforms.

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Why did Mars Petcare need a new solution?

To keep sales reps and other customer-oriented personnel up to date, Mars Petcare in Brazil created a sales portal to access marketing collateral, training information, and their own private social network. To enhance use of the content, especially by sales associates and distributors, the company sought to create a mobile app that would be easy to navigate and use.

Mars Petcare in Brazil worked with Fortuitas, a Xamarin Premier Consulting Partner that specializes in designing and building custom mobile apps, websites, intranets, and online communities. Fortuitas used the Xamarin Platform and Xamarin.Forms to create a cross-platform iOS and Android app. "We produced the app in two phases, using 100% Xamarin.Forms,” says Jack Kurtz, CEO of Fortuitas. “The first phase was completed within two months by two developers. They completed the second phase, introducing new features, in just two more months.”

Going mobile nets huge increase in employee engagement

Accessed through a web browser, the previous sales portal made it challenging for users in the field to find important information quickly. Mars Petcare hoped that a move to mobile would increase the use of the portal by sales associates and distributors, and the app Fortuitas built with Xamarin exceeded those expectations.

"Initially there were just a few hundred people using the portal,” Kurtz says. “After deploying the mobile app, those numbers skyrocketed to almost 3,000 users. We’ve been told that people love it because it provides the true mobile user experience, they needed to access high value content.”

Sharing resources and building a secure mobile community

Mars sales reps and other users value the newly mobile portal because of the ease with which they can access and share blogs, collateral, and other materials and collaborate socially, helping build a sense of community. Fortuitas, working with the Xamarin Platform, provided seamless integration with the Mars private social network in the app to enable reps to share content with colleagues. The solution also provides secure authentication and a single-sign-on user experience.

“Our ability to use Xamarin to create all of the user interface using the same code across platforms was a major time saver,” Kurtz says. “The 100% code sharing reduced our total development time for the iOS and Android apps by at least 50%.”

To download the original case study on the Xamarin project for Mars, Whiskas & Pedigree Inc. please click on this link

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