How a car-washing company startup turned towards digitalization to streamline their processes and increase their productivity.
Company Background
A start-up car washing company, started by a trio of young entrepreneurs and based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, created an eco-friendly car-wash, which eschews soap and water for a plant-based cleaning solution. With a philanthropic approach as their focus, the company donates money from each wash to communities in need. Serving the Greater Philadelphia Area including Bucks, Delaware, Montgomery and Chester counties.
Initially, the organization was dependent on telephone calls and paper to keep track of their schedules and appointments. Schedule slippage, missing appointments and coordinating & managing became a major overhead and was affecting the company’s overall performance. They were looking for an end-to-end solution for client and employee management, and to streamline their processes for increased outputs. With this in mind, they approached Saransh to help them with automation of their systems and working, while looking at ways to increase their productivity.
Roadmap
Based on the initial discussion, the Saransh team carried out brainstorming sessions with the client and chalked out set up, process and the roadmap. The following aspects were focused on:
Simple Application
To begin with a simple and easy to use application for both, customer and employee, user type
Discoverability
Categorized, grouped and placed each element to match user’s mental modal
Check Status
Users would be able to send and receive communication regarding the wash, keep track of delivery time, raise concerns and provide feedback
Scalability
Accounted for the scalability of business structure in anticipation of future requirements
The Saransh Solution
Based on the user inputs and analysis, the Saransh team designed and developed a user-friendly mobile application, for iOS and android, with different logins for customer, employee and an admin.
Designing
A flowchart was prepared to guide the flow of information and Navigation Architecture was designed. Based on this direction, wireframes of the application were designed and the interactive prototype was created. Using the interactive prototype, the new product was validated with various users and collected feedback. Based on the feedback, the prototype was fine-tuned and the design was taken up for development.
Tools: Sketch / Illustrator, UXPin, Pencil & Paper
Design Methodology: Design Thinking / User Centric
Development
Once the design and mockups were delivered to the development team, the developers initiated the coding for the same. The development team developed the iOS and Android applications on native platforms to create an intuitive, stable application. The application was integrated with Java REST API and all the features were made functional, before the testing team fixed all bugs in the application and the end-user product was delivered to the client.
Technologies Used: iOS Toolkit, iOS map kit, Android (Java), Google Maps, .Net, Java REST API, SQL Server
The Outcome
The launch of Android and iOS applications showed immediate effects on the company’s performance. The value-addition to the company could be seen with its increase in revenue, as well as its evaluation and happier customers.
- Employee productivity increased tremendously with reduced paperwork, better customer data accessibility and streamlined processes.
- A rapid increase in customer satisfaction was recorded as the customers got all facilities in a systematic and timely manner. They were also happy with the enhanced communication with the company representatives.
- The management was able to scale their business model as the automation helped them serve more customers in lesser time, as well as found the percentage of recurring customers base to be increasing.