Digital inspections app

The ‘time is money’ principle is most tangible with the delivery of perishable products. The process needs to be fast and transparent. You will only earn a customer’s trust if they know exactly where and in what state their product is at any given time.

Our customer is a leading airfreight forwarder specializing in perishable goods shipping. They import and export perishable commodities from the United States to destinations worldwide. Initially, they relied on SaaS solutions like Record 360 to photograph cargo and form PDF reports for their database. But the need for more effective functionality and costly licenses have prompted them to look for other solutions.

Their first try to get a custom app didn’t go well. The functionality was too complicated for warehouse workers and still didn’t solve a problem. It took time for the company to find and trust a new development provider. They started cooperation with TRIARE on the other project – Cargo Track, an app for GPS tracking of freight. The results were to their liking; hence they also delegated the QC Able project to TRIARE.

QC Able’s main purpose was generating quality reports to send to the company’s database and linking them with consignment notes – to keep clients informed about the location and state of a product.

The challenge was to make the process of cargo inspection a lot faster. When it comes to perishable products, a report is valid for no more than two days. All the photos have a date/time stamp, so it is easy to spot delays. How do you solve that? The Discovery phase has revealed that warehouse workers are usually low-skilled, and there’s a high staff turnover. Therefore, the app for them should be extremely user-friendly.

TRIARE’s analytics looked into why the previous custom solution did not work. Plenty of unnecessary features made the product puzzling, while the most needed features were not working properly. They started to ask a different question: what’s the underlying problem, not what was the solution the company previously imagined. Exploring the client’s workflow was challenging but extremely rewarding. There were many times when the solution was almost finalized, but a little dig deeper uprooted the whole logic.

So, what features did the final version end up with?

In the first phase of the product, managers were manually forming the tasks for QC inspectors. Today, tasks are formed automatically and linked to consignment notes. User flow looks as follows:

There are solutions for QC inspectors, but they’re not tailored to specific needs. Mostly, they only allow taking photos with descriptions. QC is a unique product because it serves an individual flow and has templates for different cargo with unique questions.

It was made possible due to the dedication of analysts during the Discovery Phase. About 70% of ideas for the product’s functionality were found in this process. The app used prior to that only covered a tiny bit of these needs. Our customer had a similar experience with TRIARE when working on the previous Cargo Trak project. That is why they chose TRIARE again.

“Custom product solves a specific business problem of a particular client; SaaS only helps to solve a part of it.” Hryhorii Sirenok, PM at QC 

Currently, the company is testing the second version of the app. They were impressed by the results and are already thinking of further cooperation. It might include the third version of QC Able as well as the solutions for two more problems: reducing paperwork and speeding up the search for required pallets in the warehouse. To be continued!