I have started this project by researching the issues that Douwe Egberts and their partners experienced. Since there were several parties involved in this project all needed to be mapped and their wishes documented. The question we asked ourselves was: “Which functionalities does Douwe Egberts need to present to their field engineers so repair processes can be performed more efficiently.
After doing extensive research which included interviews with field engineers and backoffice employees, we came to the conclusion that Douwe Egberts suffered from a significant number of incorrect part orders mainly initiated by field engineers that were conducting service to the coffee machines.
The main reason for this were that field did a lot of “guess” work whilst analyzing defective machines. After that, they ordered parts using a paper order form. Backoffice employees then had to input these forms (which were mostly misread) in their order software. These factors combined resulted in faulty orders.
Our learnings resulted in a clever solution of nerdy proportions. We gathered the original exploded view technical drawings of every coffee machine that Douwe Egberts offered and used a complex overlay so that each part could be recognized. We then connected each part to Douwe Egberts’ order software and
implemented a user interface for field engineers utilizing tablets.
This resulted in field engineers being able to order parts directly from an exploded view discarding the faulty paper order forms. All our efforts lead to an efficient order process with incredibly low faults, fewer to none returns, a huge saving of costs and of course my graduation.
Since we used Magento as the driving engine of this solution. The project got recognized by the jury of Meet Magento and eventually won the “Magento Innovation award”.
