Custom Software Solutions for Manufacturing
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The Client
The company is a third-generation, family-owned industrial supplier with over 70 years of success delivering products to manufacturing customers. The company serves industries from food & beverage, general manufacturing, OEMs, agriculture, aggregate, and construction with almost 40 branches and annual sales around $150 million. With a history, and culture, dedicated to delivering exceptional customer service, this forward-thinking company put together a digital strategy master plan to ensure they will innovate to exceed customer expectations.
The Problem
As one piece of the new digital strategy, the company considered ways to increase speed-to-service and communication with their customers. As a company dedicated to listening to their customers, they took the time for “voice of the customer” sessions to sit down, ask questions, and find out what frustrations existed in day to day interactions. What they learned was that although customers loved knowing they could always speak with a person and find someone to help them, calls and emails would often interrupt daily work instead of enhancing it. Why? In most of the shop floors, warehouses, and barges where the day to day work occurs, there is little to no internet or cell signal. If a customer noticed a need for a part or were low on supplies, it required taking notes and then moving to a connected location to begin communication. Changes, additions, or checking on items would require returning to find a signal or a wired computer.
The Challenge
Designing and building ways to capture, store, queue, send, and receive user information with little or no connectivity while keeping the user experience quick and simple.
The Solution
Geneca sat down with the company to hear the problem and brainstorm solutions. Ultimately, we designed a mobile app that would allow the customer to start a ticket, type in some basic information, even snap picture of the part or packaging. The customer could continue their work even opening multiple tickets or adding more information. When the customer encounters a strong enough signal whether moving intentionally to find one, during a break, or at the end of the workday, the app would submit the tickets directly to the customer’s local branch and receive any updates to other tickets. This “click and go” solution captures the information quickly, easily, and without interrupting the flow of work. Beta customers were thrilled with the ability to make full paths through the workspace knowing they had everything they needed in a phone or tablet.
What Geneca Did
This client trusted Geneca to identify potential gaps to launching a brand-new product. In order to do so, we:
- Facilitated sessions with business stakeholders to design an approach to work with the existing branch-based customer service model while building a central company ticket portal
- Designed clean UI/UX with easy visual status cues for at-a-glance use
- Utilized the principals of IOT to deliver full app functionality while offline
- Used a combination of background services, local cache pushing, and polling to ensure the user does not see a drop in productivity
- Collected feedback from testing with initial beta customers and iterated to address newly discovered needs
- Built complex algorithm to hit the perfect mix of usability and longevity to solve for battery usage issues
- Captured and organized future feature suggestions from second round of enthusiastic users
The Results are in the Experience
Internal company employees from customer service to sales management completed full training on mobile app and back-end portal in an hour-long session. Statement heard most often, “It is so easy!”
About Geneca
Geneca is a custom software consulting company with 20+ years of experience using advanced strategies to help clients stay ahead of their competition. At Geneca, we know that software isn’t one size fits all. We explore your unique needs and identify the right solution to accomplish your goals. We create lasting, solid partnerships with our clients and work together to design revolutionary products that engage users, transform industries, and evolve with your business.