There may be some other companies with product usage, sales numbers and the global footprint of PepsiCo Inc., but it won’t take long to call the roll.

The food and beverage giant’s products are enjoyed by consumers over 1 billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. That takes a highly sophisticated sales operation, and PepsiCo has teamed up with Couchbase Inc. to architect an offline-available solution and enable field representatives at the edge.

“We penetrate more than 95% of households with our products, so we need to have a robust supply chain, as well as a good frontline sales application to be able to manage the orders and deliver the products,” said Madhav Mekala (pictured), principal architect at PepsiCo. “There is so much functionality that our frontline users do in stores, and this app enables them to do it much more efficiently.”

Mekala spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Couchbase ConnectONLINE event. They discussed the challenge of architecting an offline app for the field and the business impact of a modernized, cloud-based solution. (* Disclosure below.)

Synch to robust backend

The challenge confronted by the IT staff at PepsiCo was that many of its sales team members operate in the field, in environments where a clean internet connection is often difficult to secure. Sales is the lifeblood of retail firms, so the company pursued a technological answer that would allow orders to be transacted native to a mobile device with a robust backend for immediate processing once a connection is made.

“A member of our salesforce who goes to a store should be able to run the whole day without any major disruption, even if they are not connected,” Mekala said. “We bring all of the data into a Couchbase database on the device and then synch it when there is a connection.”

The implementation of the new app proved to be a major project, according to Mekala. For a business the size of PepsiCo, the sales volume demands a significant amount of transactional processing. But the solution has also had a positive impact in terms of providing more time for other key projects within the company.

“Hundreds of thousands of documents flow through back and forth between the devices and the server,” Mekala said. “It’s a very complex system, and from a volume perspective it’s huge. Couchbase takes care of the synch, and then we can focus on our business process.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Couchbase ConnectONLINE event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Couchbase ConnectONLINE event. Neither Couchbase Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE