JB Hunt
With over 12,000 trucks and 100,000 containers, JB Hunt is certainly a “mobile” company. But their 24,000 drivers were still navigating their worlds – from pick up to drop off and back home – using antiquated systems. JB Hunt selected Shockoe to mobilize their workforce and renew their position as a leader in transportation and logistics.
Building a Mobile Workforce
JB Hunt’s world-class development team recognized the importance of mobile workforce management solution. They were being tasked with fitting a square peg into a round hole. The legacy, third party apps JB Hunt was using weren’t designed with drivers in mind. A reboot was in order, and after freelancers and other agencies were considered they ultimately brought Shockoe in to augment their staff.
Uncovering the Problem
Shockoe believes the best mobile solutions require equal parts head and heart. While our development team went heads down to document the systems to be integrated (or scrapped), our designers hit the road to understand the behaviors of drivers and how technology could make their lives easier.
Setting the Pace of Change
Our designers realized that drivers still relied on many manual, disconnected tasks throughout their day. For instance, drivers had to log each delivery separately which almost always led to delays. Photographing deliveries was critical to ensure quality control, but the solution here was limited at best.
And while fixing these problems seemed straightforward enough, we faced an audience that was rather set in their ways. To win them over and drive new behaviors, we would have to deploy changes in an incremental manner.
Form and function. Practical and inspirational. We put together a plan to have it all.
Shipment Management. Mobilized.
We created a set of tools that helps both shippers and carriers monitor business in real time. All parties now have access to business-critical information in an easy-to-use interface. Track shipments. Publish and negotiate shipping rates. Get notifications. Analyze and improve your business operations. We brought drivers and shippers together on their terms, not ours.
“It was paramount that their efforts would be well-received by our drivers. It was a superior execution. The team at Shockoe molded themselves as part of our team, advocated for our users and what we were trying to achieve.”
– UX Manager, JB Hunt
No More Needles in Haystacks
Some distribution centers feel like small cities, and we discovered drivers can spend up to two hours finding their truck. We replaced a number on a sheet of paper with GPS-enabled wayfinding to get them to their trucks and on the road faster.
Better routes. Better Business.
Drivers have only so many hours/miles before they run out of gas. They must take certain roads, stop for specified breaks and fill up at pre-approved gas stations. Planning things out can take forever, but Trip Planner changed all this. We designed a system that allows drivers to plan their long hauls based on stations, rest areas and even their favorite restaurants. They just hit “go” and are on the road.
Is there a steak behind this sizzle? You bet.
Beautiful experiences require boss backends. Shockoe implemented a new approach for JB Hunt’s third-party libraries that included theming, auto-Refresh (implementing a SQLite/REST sync adapter), offline functionality, and data binding (backbone/Alloy). In addition to developing an independent library, our UX/UI team recreated the design of the application using JB Hunt’s latest brand standards.