Kleenheat BDMS
Kleenheat has been supplying gas to homes and businesses throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory for over 60 years.
Kleenheat’s new Bulk Delivery Management System (BDMS) was co-designed by truck drivers, schedulers, software engineers and Hatchd Digital to replace an ageing logistics system for Kleenheat’s delivery fleet. With the deadline of the decommissioning of Telstra’s 2G network looming, we delivered a fully integrated enterprise app into production in under 4 months.
Kleenheat’s bulk delivery vehicles were equipped with old 2G technology systems that updated drivers on the details of their next job and allowed them to send vehicle maintenance and cargo monitoring reports back to central offices. With the closure of the 2G network imminent the Kleenheat team ap- proached us in need of an urgent solution.
After an investigation into the bulk delivery’s current backend system, our in-depth design thinking workshop helped us gather a broad range of insights and challenges from different domains of the business, which then became defined as ideas and opportunities. We mapped out the current user journey, and captured tangible, first-hand reports of how staff interacted with the current technology, what they expected it to be capable of, and what they did and didn’t like about it.
With the foundations of our collaborative thinking established, we began to create low fidelity wireframes to lay out a new user journey, featuring an application and modern hardware that would work symbiotically with Kleenheat’s backend data system.
Our UI creative design was restricted to a carefully chosen colour suite to allow drivers to have good application visibility in different conditions on the road: long haul journeys, bright sunlight, night-time and so on. Feedback from drivers also told us that a simple layout was of utmost importance - bigger buttons and more spacing were vital for easy operation by drivers with large hands or wearing gloves.
Our user experience experts refined their lo-fi wireframes into functional and clickable prototypes, complete with our proposed interface design, and tested them with drivers, using their feedback to carry out further refinements.
Simultaneously application development began in earnest to help us meet the extra tight deadline. Kleenheat’s tech department exposed areas of their Oracle backend system with a JSON REST API via MuleSoft, that allows the application to function with it, while we used Google’s application development framework in the build.
The system uses a small Raspberry Pi on board each vehicle, which runs server code we wrote to connect the dashboard printer, a flow meter which measures the volume of gas in each tank, and the application. Rounds of comprehensive in-field testing and fixing followed before delivery.
Kleenheat’s interlinked bulk delivery solution now sees an application, backend database, in-vehicle server, flow meter and tablet all functioning in a seamless and connected ecosystem.
Initial feedback from Kleenheat is that although projects like this could take years to scope and create, they were impressed that we delivered a solution within an unusually small timeframe - all the while balancing business, admin and driver requirements.
Built to run on an intrinsically safe Android tablet (to work around hazardous materials) the application integrates with an in-cab printer and the the truck’s existing tank flow-meter via a custom Go app running on a Raspberry Pi machine located onboard the truck.