The Problem
The Cobra group is one of the leading manufacturers of conveyor belts with customers in heavy industry, food manufacturing, postal, and other sectors. We’ve had the pleasure of working with Cobra America on their web presence for several years and when they approached us to explore building a sales tool, we were excited to try something new!
Cobra America has an inventory management system that is tightly integrated with its day-to-day operations. Inside that system is a ton of information that would be very helpful to sales representatives, but the UI of the inventory management system wasn’t really designed for that. Cobra asked us to build a web application to allow salespeople to log in and see a helpful dashboard of customers, sales orders, quotes, and statuses, pulling from their inventory management system’s API.
So that’s what we did.
The Solution
We chose create-react-app to quickly build the front-end application. With React, we were able to leverage UI component libraries to pretty rapidly build out a user interface. We chose Material-UI, which offered good documentation, about every component we could think of, and the familiar look and feel of Google’s Material design system.
On the back end, we knew we needed authentication to allow salespeople to log in and we knew we needed to create our own API to talk to the inventory management API, filter the results, and return what we needed. AWS Amplify fits the bill perfectly. We were able to leverage Amplify’s authentication, API, and functions components to build Cobra’s own secure API. We leveraged Amplify’s React components for both Authentication and API requests to speed development.
Onward
This is just the start. Now that the framework has been built, we can build out additional dashboards, reports, and filters to help Cobra America’s salespeople better serve their customers.
