Industry overview
What is shaping manufacturing
Manufacturers sell to distributors, OEMs and industrial buyers, and compete on quality, delivery and service as much as price. Many are also digitising plants, sales and finance processes.
- Distributor networks remain central to reach
- Buyers expect consistent quality and on-time delivery
- Digitisation of operations and reporting is accelerating
Client background
A commercial refrigeration manufacturer, working in Australia & New Zealand. Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.
- Organisation
- A commercial refrigeration manufacturer
- Sector
- Manufacturing
- Team engaged
- IT & Development
- Services
- Mobile app development, CRM development, Data analytics & dashboards
Client challenge
Service visits were assigned by phone and recorded on paper. Customers complained about slow responses, and managers had no visibility of technician workload.
Research objectives
- Deliver on the brief: a field service app for an equipment maintenance team.
- Design around the real needs of field technicians.
- Define requirements and success criteria the solution would be tested against.
- Deliver a reliable, secure solution the team can run and extend.
Target audience
The work focused on 250 field technicians.
- field technicians250
Audiences we typically reach in manufacturing
Procurement and plant headsDistributors and dealersOEM buyersService engineersFinance and operations teams
Geographic coverage
Coverage: Australia & New Zealand. Markets: Australia and New Zealand.
- Australia
- New Zealand
Research methodology
An iterative delivery approach: discovery, design, build and test in short cycles, with the client reviewing each step.
- 1Brief
- 2Technician interviews
- 3Offline-first app
- 4Service dashboard
- 5Insight
We built a mobile app for technicians to receive jobs, record work with photos, capture customer signatures and order spare parts, working offline where needed. Data flowed into the CRM and a service dashboard.
Mobile app developmentCRM developmentData analytics & dashboards
Sampling strategy
- field technicians
- 250
- Users and stakeholders from every affected team took part in discovery workshops and acceptance testing.
Data collection
- Requirements were gathered through workshops, process walk-throughs and a review of existing systems and data.
Data quality & validation
- Peer code review on every change
- Automated and manual testing
- User-acceptance testing with the client
- Release checklist and rollback plan
Data analysis
- Usage and performance monitoring after launch
- Defect and support-ticket trends
- Process time before and after
Key findings
- Technician input on the app design made adoption fast.
Recommendations
- Build on the core insight: technician input on the app design made adoption fast.
- Track adoption and support tickets, and plan the next release from real usage.
Business impact
- Response times became visible and measurable, spare-part requests were faster, and customers received service reports automatically.
Impact is described qualitatively.
Deliverables & next steps
- Interactive dashboard
- Deployed solution with documentation and handover
- Support and maintenance plan
- Repeat the measure after changes are in place to track progress.
- A natural follow-on question: how satisfied are distributors?
Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.