Quick Quote Tool
Overview/Goal
As part of an overall strategy to diversify its customer mix, there was a desire to turn smaller customers into mill buyers. This project has been successful by doubling internal sales volume year over year.
Opportunity/Problem
Construction customers convert structural steel beams into smaller components, which are then assembled into buildings. These customers have a deep domain expertise and software, which aids in this process The key missing ingredient in all of this is mapping those customer needs to available inventory.
Process
We assembled an idea of how a system might work given what we new about existing software and our production schedule. Through a series of interviews with small customers we were able to observe, probe and gain insight in to some our fundamental questions.
Understanding
- How did they typically order material, what constraints do they have?
- What are some of the pain points challenges, what is it that we don’t know?
- Would they trust us to do the work?
- Does the prototype work? What would they want to know?
Experimentation
We split the project into two activities with near and long term goals. Taking our insights to help shape the product by servicing the needs of small customers and modeling the algorithm to match their behavior. These observations help the product meet our customers real world needs.
Brainstorming: the process and simple interface.
Evaluate
Once the product was created we were able to review it with customers. This customer focus helped us refine our short and long term vision. Adding missing features where needed and focusing on the tools accuracy.
Refine: journey from the customer perspective.
Refine: simple ui controls.
Results
The project has been very successful internally, providing a capability for the sales team, which didn’t previously exist. Sales volume using the tool has doubled over the 2 years it has been in use. The adoption is still growing externally.
