HAVI Connect Building a self-learning app to reinvent logistics

Are you curious how together with DotControl we built a smart app that is being used by 5000+ stores worldwide and was awarded the Dutch Interactive Award?

HAVI is a global company focused on innovating, optimising and managing the supply chains of leading brands. They provide services in marketing analysis, supply chain management. This rapidly developing enterprise decided to step up their game and offer their clients the perfect app that would solve their headaches. That's why they came to us and together we created HAVI Connect - the app that wins awards and hearts of users. You'll find some spicy backstage insights on how we achieved that below.

Goal

HAVI set the following objectives:

• Broaden their added value to their customers as a logistics service provider
• Use cutting-edge technologies to become more efficient and user-friendly

To us, it was clear how to achieve that. Building a smart application that takes away all the pain of stock management was the way to go. The goal was to make HAVI the indispensable logistics partner.

We assigned a dedicated team that consisted of designers and developers from DotControl as well as growth hackers from RockBoost. This team did an amazing job that eventually resulted in the DIA Gold Winner 2018.

Results

HAVI Connect is now a self-learning application that makes ordering and logistics processes almost entirely automated. It is continuously acquiring knowledge about user behaviour and stock management. Essentially, HAVI Connect predicts your stock needs and adjusts your orders to it so your employees don’t have to do it.  

All these features make HAVI Connect a solid tool for franchise businesses. But what makes it really exceptional? Remarkably user-friendly interface. Thanks to hours of on-site user testing we were able to deliver a truly intuitive tool which users are blissfully unaware of the complex connections working in the background. It’s so intuitive in fact, that you wouldn’t even notice if it was set in a foreign language :)

Currently, over 5000 fast food restaurants worldwide are using HAVI Connect, with 10,000 smartly predicted orders being Ok’d every week. And those numbers are growing exponentially week by week.

What made this project so successful?

It’s all thanks to our unique cooperation with DotControl. Data-driven growth hackers, experienced UX/UI designers and brilliant developers working under one roof deliver extraordinary results. How did it work in the case of HAVI Connect? Growth hackers from RockBoost who conducted extensive user tests were able to easily pass all the information over to designers and developers at DotControl. This close collaboration resulted in flawless communication, fast execution, and a fully data-driven approach.  

In the earliest stages of the project, we made sure everything was measured properly and we created a user testing plan which ensured every single feature of the app was thoroughly tested and validated before expanding it. We insisted on conducting onsite user tests in multiple locations to meet the needs of different types of users.

What was the biggest challenge? Like in many other big companies, HAVI had a certain vision of how their product should work and look like which was significantly different from what the users expected. They didn’t think from their customers’ perspective and this needed to change. From our experience, we know this is always the most difficult but crucial part. After conducting the first user tests we were able to detect the gap between the HAVI vision and experiences of the end-users. We made sure the decision-makers understood all the issues the users were facing and worked together towards a compromise. At the same time, we introduced a data-driven and customer-centric mindset across the whole organisation.

To wrap it up, these are the factors that contributed to the success of HAVI Connect:

• Close collaboration with DotControl that ensured flawless communication.
• Choosing the most experienced React developers on our team to build a flawless app interface.
• Transforming the fixed mindset of the HAVI team into the data-driven growth mindset. This made the decision-making process way faster and easier.
• Combining qualitative and quantitative insights on user behaviour to create a data-driven product
• Conducting weekly user testing sessions with an actual HAVI customer to ensure all the incremental changes were validated before expanding them.