Meritor Mobile

Objective: Put the whole product catalog in every salesperson’s hands

Meritor makes axles, brakes, drivelines, and other components for trucks, trailers, off-highway equipment, and military vehicles. Its sales team carried that story around in binders, brochures, and slide decks - and the content changed faster than anyone could reprint it.

In 2010, the year the first iPad launched, Meritor asked Web Ascender to build an app that would hold everything a salesperson needed to show a customer, let the marketing team update it without a developer, and work in places with no signal.

What Web Ascender Did

• An iPad sales library - a button-driven app organized by product line and market, with PDFs, slide decks, photo galleries, and video, plus a kiosk mode for trade shows
• A web content manager - Meritor’s content managers build the app’s buttons, folders, and pages on the web and publish to every device; content owners and a content report keep the library accountable
• Offline sync - we designed the sync architecture: devices download only what has changed, verify every file with checksums, and keep the full library on the iPad so it works on a plane or a shop floor. Files are served from Amazon S3 and CloudFront
• Usage analytics - every app open and button tap is recorded and sent back, with reports filtered by device, group, and business unit, tuned to handle very large data sets
• Email from the app - salespeople send content to a customer straight from the iPad, and every send is logged; later integrated with Meritor’s secure enterprise email and device-management platform
• Users, groups, and passcodes - the app prompts for a name and device groups, public and private roles, content segregated by audience, and passcode-protected sections
• Search - added in 2015 on web and mobile, matching button titles and keywords with primary and secondary keywords, and showing results as a breadcrumb path
• Three editions - the private sales app, a public edition on the App Store, and a version for the defense division, all from the same platform
• Deployment inside Meritor - packaged the web app, web service, and publishing service to run on Meritor’s own development, test, and production servers, and helped their IT team through each environment and a move behind a new load balancer
• Ten years of care - rebuilt for each major iOS release, iPhone and new iPad screen sizes, design refreshes, annual certificate renewals, and App Store submissions

The Outcome

Meritor Mobile became the way Meritor’s sales team carried the catalog: one place to find the latest brochure, show a video, and send it to a customer, with marketing in control of the content and reports showing what was actually used. We supported it from the first iPad to iOS 15, and in 2021 handed the platform to Meritor’s own team with a full knowledge transfer.