8% less wasted time from a field app designed to cross job titles and borders
Three field roles and a manager on the phone holding it together. Field research found the structure under the work, and it became one application. Sales agents now waste 8% less of their time, and the design lets the next on-ground job, or the next country, move in without a new app.
Outcome
- 8% less time wasted by on-ground sales agents, the one impact the company put a number on: more volume without spending more
- One application adopted across collector and on-ground sales roles
- The sales app and the Collector app merged into one, and new materials joined B2B collection in it without another app
- Fewer application-related calls reported by managers
The 8% comes from the company's own impact calculation for on-ground sales, and it is the only figure the project has. Nobody counted calls or task completion before the change, so the rest is directional.
Tagaddod's margin is set by what it costs to collect a ton of used cooking oil. The people doing that work are on-ground sales agents and two kinds of collectors, and their work ran through separate apps, web forms, spreadsheets and WhatsApp. When something broke, the fix was a phone call to a manager.
The brief asked for cheaper maintenance of the tools that already existed. I took a bigger question to the Chief Product Officer: could three field roles share one application without flattening their jobs? A month in the field answered it. The application had to be organised around targets, tasks and actions instead of forms, and designed so the next on-ground job could move in without anyone building another app.
One number came out of the third release: on-ground sales agents wasted 8% less of their time, which in this business means more oil collected for the same spend. The structure has since taken on new materials, fatty acids and poultry fat, without a new app. The larger return was still ahead, in the scaling the application was built for: more countries and more kinds of on-ground work, all on one application.
What the full case study covers
- What the interviews and three days of shadowing revealed about the work no tool recorded
- Why the real route lived in a collector's head, not in the app
- The design that lets a collector register a restaurant and a sales agent run a collection
- How the same model takes on a field job the company has not created yet
- The one impact the company put a number on, and the larger return still ahead: more countries and more on-ground jobs
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