Customer Lookups

Building a network of trusted carriers to prevent freight fraud

Role

Sole product designer for research, testing and design

Duration

~1 month from brief to full product launch

Collaboration

Crossfunctional: Product, design, engineering, and solutions team

Outcome

TBA

A little about Rose Rocket

Rose Rocket is a SaaS company looking to re-invent the way the transportation industry thinks about their management software. Unlike traditional transportation management software (TMS) that prescribes a specific way to run a business, Rose Rocket's platform provides organizations of any scale and function unparalleled flexibility with adaptive modules. This allows customers to only buy what they need and customize everything from their workflows to the tools and business rules that run underneath it.

Fraught with fraud: The 2023 freight landscape

One of the more recent innovations within the trucking industry is the digitization of load posting and acqusition. Whereas freight carriers once had to contact brokers or drive to certain locations to check physical boards, the advent of online load boards meant that all parties involved in the freight transport lifecycle could improve communication and cost efficiency.

Unfortunately the unintended side effect of all this was the creation a new way in which freight carriers and brokers expose themselves to fraud. Tech-savvy scammers impersonating middlemen could use various tactics to steal loads, double broker shipments, and embezzle payments while maintaining anonymity on the web.

With the freight downturn beginning in 2022 this problem only got worse: Heated competition meant that companies took the focus away from risk management and performing background checks, precisely at a when time fraud tactics were become increasingly more sophisticated thanks to advacements in technology.

The result is a perfect storm that kept and continues to keep thousands of fleet managers awake at night, with the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) reporting in 2023 that fraud was costing the industry an estimated $500-700 million USD annually, a number sadly projected to trend upwards in the years to come.

"We invest so much time each day just making sure these new partners we're working with are who they say are [...] It's like an arms race, we find a new way to verify and within months these bad actors are ahead of us again." - Paul K, KWE Inc. Canada

With fraud hurting the industry, we knew that this was the perfect space and opportunity for Rose Rocket to launch a conceptually simple but impactful feature: Carrier onboarding. Our goal was to provide a solution that allowed freight carriers to indentify and verify themselves with brokers, with the eventual goal of creating a self sustaining network of trusted partners across North America.

The current state of things

The idea of fraud prevention in the freight space is not a novel one, but what is novel about our approach is

I spent a few days unravelling what kind of documents were needed, where the pain points were and to identify areas where design could intervene. In addition to quantitative data, our revenue manager also had on hand qualitative feedback from our customers and direct access to our sales representative, allowing me to get a very complete picture of the problem.

Wait... what was it again?

The problem at hand was

A key discovery

One thing I uncovered during the discovery phase was a critical piece of information for guiding this project:

Customers are the most responsive within the first 48 hours of placing an order.

This win

Our hypothesis

Now that we had a sense of the scope, it was time to set goals for what this software should accomplish. To that end, we set up three major metrics by which we would measure the success of this project.

If we can build a better document upload and messaging system, our average document turnaround times will improve and cancellation rates will fall.

How we're measuring success

Now that we had a sense of the scope, it was time to define a few key metrics of success. Because this is a feature bundled into an existing offering tier, in addition to tracking the adoption rate of said tier we also decided to also define a few other meaningful metrics. The following is what we decided would be worth looking into:

Average financing turnaround

Achieve 90% adherence to our reconditioning standards

Average cash turnaround

Accuracy of cost estimates equal or greater than 95%

No-response/document related cancellations

Get average reconditioning costs down by 40% per vehicle

Design decisions

Our MVP was put together in a matter of weeks; a week for design and two for the engineering. Naturally everything here was pretty rough from the get-go, but we had to consciously make an effort to not let perfect be the enemy of good. We just wanted something out so we can start testing and gathering data.

In our MVP we included the most basic of features that we knew would form the backbone of our new system:

Creating a reconditioning job from a standardized reconditioning list,
Inputting cost estimates for said jobs and;
Adding and associating invoices for these jobs once completed.

Once we had the MVP out, we immediately put the system in the hands of our Ontario reconditioning team. Given that having something was better than nothing at all, the teams immediately took to the MVP and gave us fantastic feedback over the course of a two week trial run.

Lessons from our MVP

By all metrics, the MVP proved that we were on the right track; initial numbers were better than what we hoped for and gave us a much needed confidence boost. Despite that, there were also a few areas we had to work on:

Allow for multi-invoice uploads

We needed to allow more flexibility when assigning invoices, as work is usually done in batches.

Account for more edge cases

Returning parts and cancelling labour is very common and always affects cost calculations.

Have better vendor integration

Cost tracking with vendors was still highly inconsistent due to loopholes we didn't anticipate.

All of these improvements were taken into consideration for our V2 that we rolled out shortly thereafter.

Reconditioning 2.0

Incorporating all of the feedback, RCT 2.0 would become more fleshed out than before.

Our first order of business was to tackle how invoices were being uploaded. Our MVP called for one upload invoice per job, but because vendors almost always collate invoices and send them out in batches, this quickly led to one invoice being uploaded repeatedly. We obviously didn't want our mechanics to be uploading invoices all day - especially not the same ones - so we came up with a system to dramatically cut down upload times: allow for multiple jobs to be selected when uploaded, then the software would handle the rest by making copies for every single selection.

Unused parts and labour that has been cancelled before commencement was a common occurance, and our MVP had no ability to account for or rectify that, preventing our cost estimates to achieve the best possible degree of accuracy. I subsequently designed a system that allowed returns to be intiated from and attached to an existing order, then using a modified version of our new multi-invoice upload system, single out the unused part or labour and appropriately assign receipts for that one aspect of the job only.

While we cleaned up our interal cost inconsistencies with the aforementioned two major fixes, we still had a problem with our vendors adding on unauthorized work on site last minute. To tackle this, we took a different approach. We negotiated with our vendors to adhere to our Purchase Orders (P.O.) system, an automatically generated document that was sent prior to any work being done. Since only authorized work would be on the order, anything that fell outside of it required another P.O. to be generated. This gave us a perfect paper trail that would also help accounting with finances after.

Of course, a new version also required visual polishes and quality of life improvements. Among many minor tweaks, one of the biggest changes here was the move to condense information and make editable cells instead of the formerly space heavy input boxes.

With all of these changes, we knew we were close to the final product and were confident in making our Q4 release date.

Putting it all together: RCT 3.0

The results

Once we had given our mechanical team the full rundown of the latest changes, it took them almost no time to acclimate and continue work as usual. As we monitored the data that was coming in we found that not only did we hit our targets, but in some instances, exceeded them as well. What's most significant is our cost savings; We were able to bring average reconditioning costs down by 45% per vehicle, which represented hundreds of thousands of dollars saved.

With RCT we were able to be more efficient and consistent with our resources while still giving customers quality cars with amazing value. Thats a win-win for everyone involved.

Within a month of launching in Ontario, our software was adopted by all of Clutch's other markets with equal success.

It was extremely rewarding to see our reconditioning teams process vehicles more efficiently, with significantly reduced frustration and mental fatigue. Our accounting team was also equally pleased with the greater degree of transparency and accountability, not to mention the massive time and wage savings for the business in general.

Building an ecosystem

Our cost tracking tool was just the beginning. Riding on this success, we released three additional pieces of internal software to optimize and scale operations, namely a vehicle inspection and onboarding suite of software that served as a precursor step to reconditioning, as well as delivery tracking and management system for the vehicle further along it's reconditioning lifecycle.

Lessons learned

What is also important here was what we learned as a team and business. The success of this project proved to the organization that good process and informed design decision making was not only beneficial, but essential in helping our business scale going forward. Whereas formerly we'd only emphasize design in customer facing products, this project paved the way for design to be involved in the decision making process and add value for our internal tools as well.

Want to learn more?

There's a lot more detail and thought that went into this project than is practical to show in this format. If you'd like to get a full walkthrough, please contact me.