Streamlining field operations for engineers through bespoke integrations and best practice UX and UI design.
Aggreko are the world’s largest temporary power generation company, supplying temporary generators, cooling and heating systems in over 100 countries. Keeping a huge global inventory of equipment and assets in perfect working order is a key challenge for Aggreko, and in 2017 they approached Screenmedia to support them in revolutionising their technician processes as part of their company-wide Aggreko18 digital transformation programme.
Aggreko’s technicians had a multitude of asset user manuals, warehouse stock management applications, and checklists spread across disparate devices and databases. Their mission was to consolidate their resources into a single app, boosting efficiency, compliance, customer satisfaction, and Aggreko’s bottom line.
After a thorough audit of existing technician workflows and user behaviour, our planning team crafted detailed user flows, wireframes, and clickable prototypes to validate and test the proposed app UX, workflow enhancements, and streamlined task models. During this phase our experienced technical team also consulted on the ideal setup and solution architecture as well as the best development approach to enable Aggreko to build a solution library of modular components in Xamarin that could be reused or form the foundation of future developments.
Working from newly formed corporate brand guidelines, our team developed a design concept for the app’s user interface. The final concept brought the brand to life across colour, type, layout, tone of voice, interaction, and transition design. Drawing on our experience of the brand and its digital application we were able to deliver a high contrast, rich, and responsive UI which received widespread positive feedback. This app, along with the Health & Safety reporting app UX/UI delivered by Screenmedia, has set the internal benchmark for application design at Aggreko.
Our Scrum master and project manager supported the team at Aggreko by breaking down the app’s features and functionality into a series of functional and non-functional user stories to which detailed acceptance criteria were appended. Using VSTS to track development activity we undertook a series of development sprints to deliver each piece of robust technology. During development, we implemented a pull request process to drive developer knowledge and to ensure that when we handed the code back to the Aggreko team to maintain they had extensive knowledge of the solution. This process drove continuous integration to ensure continuous testing and qualification of code.
Within the application we utilised Azure for user authentication (Active Directory), App Centre for analytics integration, and Service Fabric for the API (hosted on Azure). The app was designed to be as modular as possible, with Screenmedia supporting component development and specification such as the component used for AD authentication. Aggreko will now be able to use these modular components in future app projects.
Following a pilot phase of 100 users in the AusPac region, and with zero medium or high priority issues identified, the app is currently being rolled out to Aggreko’s 5,000 field technicians globally. In less than 12 months, Screenmedia has helped Aggreko transform their working practices, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency exponentially. The project has been hugely successful and the Aggreko18 programme of transformation is on track for completion later this year.
