One of the customers taking part was the owner/transport leader at a haulage company, and he described a situation whereby his entire process – from receiving the customer’s order, and issuing information to drivers, to collecting all the necessary data for the invoice – was still being performed with pen and paper. Put briefly, the procedure was manual, inefficient and time-consuming. Furthermore, there was no overview or control over the commitments his company had made to the clients. We suspected that there must be several customers who shared the same problems.
We conducted interviews with a number of customers and soon realised that several others (in fact, the majority of those we consulted) reported the same experience. They took orders from customers by telephone or text message, made a note of order details such as addresses, ID codes, contact names etc. on a piece of paper – or sometimes even on paper cups, weighing slips, post-it notes, or whatever else was close at hand. They then called their drivers and relayed this information. The drivers would then copy down the same information on a new piece of paper. Sometimes, they would use text messages to simplify the relaying of information.
Upon completion of the job, the drivers reported their hours worked on time slips, noted the tools that had been used and the materials that had been delivered, and also noted any extra work that the customer had ordered on site (of which the traffic leader hadn’t previously been informed).
At the end of the week, all these pieces of paper were given to the traffic planner, and then the whole weekend would often be spent organising the papers and matching them against the order book in order to be able to send a correct invoice to the customer.
Some customers were slightly better organised, using separate journals for each vehicle – in other words, there was more order to their paperwork. Finally, however, the same administrative work still remained – somebody would have to gather all the papers together and match them against the order book, and hope that all the relevant slips had been provided in order to produce the invoices.
In our interviews, we found that several customers had previously used or looked into various digital systems, but they had often decided they were too complicated, too difficult to use, or just too expensive. We saw an opportunity to provide a solution to this problem.
We created Workify. With a simple digital platform that brings the entire information flow together in one place, we could offer our end customers a solution for simpler and faster communication, less manual work, better control, and more professional service for their clients.
Workify has been developed using modern methods and development tools, with a total focus on user-friendliness and robust functionality. All the functions in Workify come from our customers’ requests and preferences, and they have been tested by our test customers. Throughout the development process, our core principles have been based on simplicity and user-focus.
To begin with, the project operated as a start-up within Hiab, and quickly gained several satisfied customers.
Since 1 July 2020, Workify has operated as an independent company. It is still run by the same people who came up with the original initiative at HIAB and who developed the software that is now driving the company forwards into the future.