Flexport Trucking
Destination Coordination
Problem • Operations teams spend between 3 and 45 minutes managing each destination trucking leg. Instead, they should be spending zero minutes on this work in order to reduce the cost to serve and free them up to do strategic, value add work.
Responsibilities • Lead designer & Researcher
Flexport Trucking
Destination Coordination
Problem • Operations teams spend between 3 and 45 minutes managing each destination trucking leg. Instead, they should be spending zero minutes on this work in order to reduce the cost to serve and free them up to do strategic, value add work.
Responsibilities • Lead designer & Researcher
Flexport Trucking
Destination Coordination
Problem • Operations teams spend between 3 and 45 minutes managing each destination trucking leg. Instead, they should be spending zero minutes on this work in order to reduce the cost to serve and free them up to do strategic, value add work.
Responsibilities • Lead designer & Researcher
Flexport Trucking
Destination Coordination
Problem • Operations teams spend between 3 and 45 minutes managing each destination trucking leg. Instead, they should be spending zero minutes on this work in order to reduce the cost to serve and free them up to do strategic, value add work.
Responsibilities • Lead designer & Researcher
Flexport Trucking
Destination Coordination
Problem • Operations teams spend between 3 and 45 minutes managing each destination trucking leg. Instead, they should be spending zero minutes on this work in order to reduce the cost to serve and free them up to do strategic, value add work.
Responsibilities • Lead designer & Researcher
01. Overview
What is Flexport?
Flexport is a freight forwarder (think travel agent for freight) who uses technology, physical infrastructure, and human expertise to facilitate global trade. Over 10,000 clients in over 116 countries utilize Flexport’s freight services and industry disrupting software to provide enhanced visibility and control over their supply chain.
Trucking at Flexport
Destination coordination is arguably the most critical point of the shipment lifecycle. As a shipment approaches its final destination, deadlines approach and inventory demands grow. Our product team works to serve real time updates first hand from those closest to the goods, working across personas, to make trucking at Flexport easy, efficient, and transparent.
Increase Operational Productivity by 50%
Freight is an incredibly labor intensive industry. Flexport’s mission has always been to decouple growth from headcount by building tech to support our operations users. With a recommitment to this lofty 2020 OKR, the project became a top business priority.
02. Research
30 participants across 6 global offices
I lead recruiting, planning, facilitation, and synthesis of 17 sessions over 3 weeks to identify trucking workflow, touchpoints, opportunities for eventual centralization/automation. We talked to operations users in our primary destination facing offices, including Amsterdam to understand the local needs of trucking in the EU.
"
The trucking leg is so much more than just A to B. There's so much more that needs to happen, as well as a higher level of service for that final leg, last mile delivery where the client is on you.
"
I have to go to loads of places in order to figure out what to do. There is no repository for all this stuff.
Participants were recruited based on a combination of tenure, client segment, and mix of shipment types in order to get the most well rounded idea of all the nuances of trucking legs since there are many flavors and processes.
Synthesis focused around mapping the qualitative insights from our interviews across the trucking journey, brainstorming how might we opportunities, and prioritizing their impact with our business counterparts. Research culminated in a presentation of insights to over 30 engineering and business stakeholders
03. Alex, the Operations Associate
Responsibilities
• Anything and everything to facilitate and coordinate the movement of a shipment from beginning to end, including a variety of repetitive and transactional tasks
• Manage client relationship throughout the shipment lifecycle
Motivations
• Being challenged to solve problems when things go awry
• Build relationships with clients to become a true partner in his client’s business
• Find opportunities to help his clients optimize their supply chain
About
• Transitioned to data science 9 months ago
• Graduated from data science bootcamp
• Bachelor of Science in Economics
Responsibilities
• Collaborates with her business team to identify key questions to answer
• Explores, cleans, and prepares data for analysis
• Builds models and algorithms to draw insights from large data sets
• Creates data visualizations inspired by the work of her peers
"
Outside of the process it is the client interaction. It is super cool to solve and advise your clients on the logistics aspect of it. You are now part of their supply chain.
"
What motivates me is what I can do with data to impact a population and make a change.
Workflow
A
When a shipment is in transit to the destination port, it will enter Alex’s dispatch dashboard, which currently lives in a 3rd party tool.
B
To ensure the shipment can be legally delivered, Alex follows his validate checklist that all documents are in order. Since there is no product built for this, he cross references several tools and leaves himself a note that it is done.
C
Then to dispatch the shipment, Alex will update and send the Delivery Order (DO) to the trucker. This document will be used to retrieve the goods at port. It is important that Alex gets the DO to the trucker early so they can plan for it, so he will need to continue to edit it as more information comes in.
D
Once the DO is sent, Alex will use another dashboard to track all shipments that are ‘out for delivery.’ However, if he needs to act on any of them he must go into his internal tool to make updates.
Pain Points
Disjointed, unreliable Tools
“We check like five different tables. They take so long to refresh and they’re not reliable."
-Stephanie Ogwo, ATL
Non Standardized Workflows
“If you asked 5 different people what the process is, you would get 5 different answers."
-Marjon VanVeen, AMS
Repetitive, low value add work
“It’s really repetitive. All I do is click a button."
-Ellen Kirkness, CHI
Fear of missing time sensitive Information leads to re-work
“If you miss something, it’s not going to move. We do sweeps three times a day just in case."
-Koen de Korte, AMS
Opportunities
How might we streamline the workflow and consolidate tools?
How might we make all trucking legs a standardized, repeatable process across teams and modes?
How might we systematically free operations from non value add transactional work so their time can be spent elsewhere?
How might we establish trust and visibility so that work is not unnecessarily redone?
04. Design Process
Sprint
Taking what was learned from research, we kicked off the design process with a cross functional brainstorm involving product management, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders. The point of the brainstorm was to co-create together what the vision for trucking tools could look like and ideating on our previously defined opportunity statements.
Validation > Strategy > Prioritization
After validating our sprint ideas with users, we presented to senior leadership on multiple occasions to gain buy in on our long term vision. Our strategy was then to narrow in on an MVP to tie validate, dispatch, and track touchpoints together into one workflow, sunset external tools, and build a foundation for workflow visibility to support future automation initiatives.
Initial concepts shown to users and stakeholders validate ideas and establish roadmap (top)
Iterative Design & Research
While user built tools were a wealth of insight into what information users need, to ensure we were building an experience that could replace them required extensive evaluative research.
A one week study with 5 participants of two iterations of prototypes helped shape our initial concepts into viable, engineering ready design.
Figma prototype used to evaluate design with users
Prototyping Feedback
A one week study with 5 participants of two iterations of prototypes (one seen above) helped shape our initial concepts into viable, engineering ready design.
Retain validation visibility
“Maybe we could leave the valid check marks that we're looking for when we're actually clicking in the shipment.”
Nest rows to mitigate overload
“Since this is separated out by container you don’t miss anything which is good. But it can be overwhelming will all the shipments I’m watching”
Provide more shipment information to avoid inefficient work arounds
“That's my plan to do if I have any issues where I need more information I can't see in, I'll copy and paste it into a note for myself.”
Beta Feedback
Once coded, a second week long study involving 5 additional in depth interviews helped provide detail to the ongoing real time collection of feedback from 15 beta testers providing via slack.
One of the biggest points of feedback at this stage highlighted the need to explore Rail visibility. As a mode, rail transport is known as being unreliable and hard to track. The design challenge here was to provide additional information for rail shipments without overwhelming the user with this information when not-applicable.
01. Toggle Rail Visibility Columns On and Off
Pros: High discoverability and single click interaction
Cons: Heavy engineering lift
02. Nested Legs
Pros: Row level information appears when applicable
Cons: User confusion when visualizing a linear process in a wrapped format
03. Custom column sets [winner]
Pros: Match user’s mode based mental model and provide them control with light engineering lift
Cons: Less discoverable
General Availability
Freight forwarding is a game of exceptions, nuances across modes of transports, and regulations.
As a requirement for GA, all possible validations and edge cases had to be accounted for in order for the product to be used in the real world.
Only once all permutations were accounted for and beta feedback in decline did we roll out the new product to all 800+ operations users.
05. Outcome
Now Alex, the Operations Associate, can validate, dispatch, and track all of his shipments from a single tool. All three of these tasks live in one cascading workflow, separated into three queues each shipment will move between as each action is completed.
Consolidate
Standardize
Automate
Visibility
01.
Alex can validate incoming shipments
Alex now has a centralized workqueue to manage his inbound shipments that need to be validated, rather than referencing multiple external dashboards
From the customizable and prioritized list of shipments that need his attention, Alex can work through the standard validation checklist and mark each shipment as ready for dispatch well ahead of when it’s needed. Because his workflow is now productized, in the future the process can be analyzed and further streamlined.
02.
Alex can dispatch trucking orders
Alex can then see all his shipments that have been validated and dispatch them as the proper time approaches. He can even schedule them to send at the appropriate time for each of his trucking partners.
If any delivery orders need adjustment, Alex can launch directly into a dedicated workspace to update the documentation without leaving the context of his workflow.
If he should need more information to properly fill out the delivery order, he can access detailed shipment information from his workspace for reference.
03.
Alex can track his shipments to final destination
Finally, once a shiment has been dispatched, Alex can passively track its final destination from his track queue, understanding where exactly each sub-part of a shipment is, where updates are coming from, and if he needs to take action.
06. Results
Improved user experience
Users have repeatedly mentioned that this has greatly improved their productivity and allowed them to break some of their productivity bad habits, such as checking on shipments just in case something might have happened. They agree that it is more trustworthy and simple than the external tools they were using before. Even more, the improved experience and added visibility has allowed users to catch work that would have previously fallen through the cracks, saving the company and our clients hundreds of dollars.
"
The 'track' table is already logically way better than our old table. I caught a shipment for another team that would have sat at the port for a month and accrued thousands in fees.
"
What motivates me is what I can do with data to impact a population and make a change.
Sunset 3rd party tools
The new workspace enabled us to break up with our previous 3rd party data tool, that should have never been used as a workflow tool in the first place. Additionally, productizing this work reduces the amount of engineering support that was previously needed to maintain SQL tables outside our platform.
Unlock automation and optimization opportunities
Another success of this project was going from zero time tracking instrumentation to having full coverage of our user's workflow. Now we have data that we've never had before to make smarter product and design decisions going forward. It has enabled us to analyze how work is being done, what work is most time consuming, and what work can be automated away. Already, we are building mechanisms to automatically send delivery orders based on what we have learned.
