Vehicle Planning - [short version]
Challenge
To design a custom solution for the national planning operation of a logistics company. This would involve the users completing complex, specialised tasks within a data-dense display. Existing products in the market had failed due to being too cumbersome and difficult to use, so the users had resorted to using Excel which came with its own set of issues.
The solution would have 5 users who use it for the majority of their working day, each day planning around 250 jobs split among 150 drivers across 30 teams.
Approach
I ran 3 user interviews and spent a day observing the live operation. I identified 3 broad themes:
Expert users – the solution would be used every day, all day long, by a handful of expert users. This meant leaning more towards functionality, speed-of-use and fast access to system actions.
Support complex, specialised tasks with data-dense display – the user is making complex decisions using multiple pieces of data at once; the job details, the available teams and drivers and the jobs already on each team. The ability to see all of this within a single view is desirable and as screen space is limited, pruning redundant data is a must. Scannability of data is crucial too.
Large volumes of data – it would need to cope well with the volume of data – currently 250 jobs per day and up to 150 drivers, with scope for this to increase in the future. Therefore filtering and chunking data into groups, as well as providing an overall summary will be key to success.
Results
Won a new customer which increased our total revenue by 6%. Before this project they were very close to abandoning us as a supplier after the first failed implementation of the legacy system.
High customer satisfaction with the end result, which cut planning times considerably and gave a clearer view of the overall plan. The implementation was seamless and within the first day the users were using it to plan the live operation with minimal guidance from our implementation team.
There was 1 support ticket raised in the first month after go-live, which compares well to the 13 raised in the same time period by a different customer who recently started using our legacy system.