When offering trench and traffic safety equipment rentals to customers, NTS structures rental agreements and payment terms that are often tough to keep track of. The NTS WorkZone web-app provides a one-stop customer view with data pulled from the Infor ERP. Designli provided a Dedicated Product Team to rebuild and modernize the previous, outdated portal.
We were approached by National Trench Safety’s leadership, whose team bemoaned the customer portal that was in place at the time. With slow loading times and less-than-ideal options for visualizing data and dumping out reports, the existing web portal was only used by a small fraction of NTS’ customers.
This left the NTS team needing to handle support tickets manually, sending reports and contract updates to customers by hand and upon request - instead of being able to defer those requests to the self-service portal.
As all projects do here at Designli, the NTS WorkZone initiative began with a thorough review of the National Trench Safety business model and how software ‘fits in.’
If we were going to set about rebuilding the customer portal, what other manual processes could we bring into this web-app? During our workshop, issues like ‘calling off’ items from rent came to light - which were natural candidates for inclusion in the new web-app with a minimal impact to development time/cost.
As an established, enterprise business, the new WorkZone portal couldn’t be built in a silo. Instead, a key requirement was that it would sync with Infor - the ERP that National Trench Safety runs its business off of - to allow customers to see data specific to their account. Architecture recommendations were documented as part of the SolutionLab.
With a clear vision for the reimagined customer portal fully documented, our next step was to complete the Graphic Design (UX/UI) of the system using the existing National Trench Safety brand deck and style guide. Our team prepared a clickable demo (prototype) of the system using Figma, which NTS stakeholders were able to give feedback on to ensure alignment before coding began.
Moving into the Development phase, Designli assigned a Dedicated Product Team composed of one Flutter developer, one Front-end Web developer, one Backend Web developer, and a part-time Product Owner - for a fixed period of time. This allowed our team to maintain resource cohesiveness, focusing full-time on the rapid launch of the system since timeline was a priority for NTS leadership. With the WorkZone portal finishing under the expected timeframe, our dedicated team was able to shift to other priorities at the customer’s guidance.
Flutter, AngularJS, NodeJS, Loopback
"Working with Designli has been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. They’ve managed to build a working product from scratch within an aggressive timeline."
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