Blast - Project Tracking and Compliance Reporting
Steam and Sand is a commercial blasting and painting business with one of New Zealand's largest blasting facilities in their warehouse as well as dedicated mobile crews servicing structures in-situ. With their industry going through a process of change, maturing to require improved accountability and compliance reporting on their projects, Steam and Sand had a go at developing their own reporting and compliance tool.
Satellite came on board at a point where the development of their tool had progressed to a stage where they didn’t have an MVP release ready, but they felt like they were close. They needed help to get it over the line.
The Challenge
Satellite set up a series of workshop sessions with the owners of Steam and Sand to help understand their application’s development journey to date, figure out where things had gone wrong, and scope some recommendations for getting the project back on track as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The project Satellite inherited needed some architectural changes that were responsible for the progress having halted before we were involved. Working closely with the client we explained what issues we needed to prioritise and while these conversations were progressing we got our UX designers involved to rethink the layout challenges. By addressing the UX issues, screen by screen, we were able to clearly define the functionality the app would support.
The Solution
Satellite delivered an MVP within the first 4 weeks of onboarding the project, and enabled Steam and Sand to start using their new tool in Production.
The initial end to end functionality enabled a job to be assigned to a customer, then planned as a series of tasks. Then each task within the job would be assigned to a role-based user in the warehouse, and they could update the status of the task to create progress visibility for the owners.
Staff could see the instructions (and photos) describing their task, and in turn they were able to take photos of their work to confirm it had been done correctly. Once they had a working viable product, they could start scoping how it could be improved.
By partnering with Satellite, Steam and Sand were able to help drive the priority order of the app’s capability. Satellite were able to bring our experience in what’s possible, to recommend functionality they hadn’t even considered. Through a process of continuous improvement Steam and Sand’s project management application now sets the industry standard for Blasting and Painting compliance reporting. Their application is integrated with MYOB for clients, quoting and invoicing and they have unprecedented visibility across their significant number of projects on-site and in-situ.
The Results
Satellite is working closely with the owners on growth and expansion. They have multiple interested businesses who want to adopt their solution for their own compliance reporting and we are working together to achieve this next step in their technology journey.
