Designing a new digital logistics tracking system to deliver value—12 weeks sooner than expected

The Challenge

Given the rapid pace of GlobalTranz’s growth, both organically and through acquisitions since its founding in 2003, the company needed to define and build a new track-and-trace system in weeks rather than months to realize maximum value.

As part of a broader effort to consolidate and optimize technology platforms, company leaders launched a project to define and build a single, user-friendly system that all users and customers would use for tracking and tracing shipments. The solution needed to be flexible to support both current and future operations – including additional acquisitions.

The accelerated development of a Track and Trace system was critical to ensuring GlobalTranz could reach parity of functionality and support simultaneous growth and modernization efforts across several areas of the business. With this digital mindset, the company aimed to deliver a better customer experience, access stronger integration between core systems, streamline internal processes, add flexibility to extend processes and automation as the company continued to grow and change.
 

An Undeniably Different Approach

Our team brought the skills, best practices, and proven approach for delivering a new track-and-trace system with essential features, known as a minimum viable product, within weeks and then increasing its capabilities over time.

We believe it is important not to just to develop and deliver a MVP—but also to work alongside our clients to improve their ability to deliver more quickly using this approach. The approach was focused on delivering a new, digital system with speed, while also ensuring a quality user experience. We paired our team of industry, design, technology, product development, and change management experts with GlobalTranz’s own technologists, product owners, and business subject matter experts.

Recognizing the importance of user experience, the team used design thinking and involved actual users in at the beginning and throughout process. User involvement at the outset helped the team identify pain points and understand key activities to improve adoption and experience from day one. This exercise then provided input for designing screen concepts.

Real Results

Working closely together, GlobalTranz and West Monroe technical experts developed the architecture, forecasted the engineering effort, and created a detailed plan for both the initial product (the MVP) and future enhancements (the backlog). In eight weeks, we rapidly mobilized a design and engineering team to develop and deliver the initial Track and Trace system.

Through West Monroe’s unique approach, the new system was developed three months sooner than expected and allowed the company to realize value 66% faster.

In addition to the MVP Track and Trace system, project outputs included:

• 18 scenario maps
• 4 user personas
• 3 user experience (UX) screens
• A list of 268 enhancements to be delivered during future development iterations