As an automotive manufacturer, ensuring that vehicles are shipped with the correct specifications is critical for quality assurance, for customer satisfaction and to avoid sales issues. The actual vehicle specs must align with marketing materials and match customer requests. Previously, the process to verify over 300 individual spec items in one vehicle was conducted by team members using pen and paper, taking several hours to complete it, often prone to error. The client approached Fabric to identify a tech solution to make this process faster and simpler to perform and increase the quality and accuracy of the vehicles information.
Our multidisciplinary team designed a set of activities to identify the project’s objective and define the scope. Using gamestorming techniques we gathered assumptions around the users and their pain points, mapped out user journeys while uncovering the technical landscape and integrations.
To validate some of the initial assumptions the experience designers and developers followed users while performing their vehicle fully immersing in how the checking process worked. This helped the team to identify particular areas prone to errors or open for substantial improvement.
An existing complex set of tools used to support vehicles production and marketing content management were audited and analysed to guarantee a seamless workflow. It was critical to understand how other tools influenced the checking process and its technical and design limitations.
A mix of collaborative sketching, rapid prototyping and several rounds of testing guaranteed a thorough involvement of end-users in the concept and solution. This led to an intuitive and user-friendly system design.
An educated and value-led sprint planning process helped prioritise user stories with stakeholders. This ensured the riskiest assumptions were validated upfront and team members could test the core journeys early, guaranteeing business needs were met.
A responsive app aligned with the user’s need for a solution allowing pre-checking tasks on a computer and a solution they could use at the receiving port to check vehicles on-site on mobile devices.
The transition from paper to digital allowed us to equip the workflow with innovative features that optimised processes. These features were designed to eliminate pain-points and meet the needs of the user. Search functions eliminate time spent ruffling through papers, visibility of status lets users quickly prioritise tasks, and accordion lists organise data into categories for easy access of information.
Multiple applications in the ecosystem were integrated through a Restful API that allowed all data to flow seamlessly across Toyota’s ecosystem.
For every vehicle checked, users had to print a list of over 300 spec items, manually check all of them and update all the data on the vehicle information management system. With the new software, users simply have to check spec items on the new app and the data is automatically synced.
New functionality allows users to only check and deal with changed or critical vehicle specifications. This means that users are not wasting time making redundant checks, and have more time for checking items that are more likely to lead to errors, improving efficiency and quality.
The reduction of steps involved in the process and the new data logging functions meant users had complete and instant visibility of everything they’ve checked and who did it at any point in time. This meant fewer opportunities to make mistakes and more ways to check for errors.
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