WITT Gas is a market leader and high-quality manufacturer of gas safety and control equipment. They have a varied product range, distributed to a number of different sectors. Wherever gases are used, WITT Gas products are specified owing to their high precision and reliability. Their headquarters are in Witten, Germany. However, through its subsidiary companies and partners, the company now operates worldwide.
WITT Gas is a market leader and high-quality manufacturer of gas safety and control equipment. They have a varied product range, distributed to a number of different sectors. Wherever gases are used, WITT Gas products are specified owing to their high precision and reliability. Their headquarters are in Witten, Germany. However, through its subsidiary companies and partners, the company now operates worldwide.
Beeta was commissioned by WITT Gas to develop a web-based software solution to manage the returns process of their products with a catch-all system that identified the current stage of repair. The challenge they faced was that their existing system was labour-intensive, requiring the team to physically monitor the equipment. Ultimately, this had a negative knock-on effect on customer service.
We needed to minimise the manual processes WITT Gas used to track and manage product returns and instead use automation to identify and update clients. The pre-existing system had little visibility for the status of product repair and the stage it was at in the returns process was logged on an outdated spreadsheet. To improve the overall customer service the system also needed the functionality to retrospectively report and analysing the returns data.
The first aspect of the brief was to work alongside the team to gather precise requirements so that we could scope and deliver the project the ‘Beeta’ way, utilising our 3-step approach. Due to the need for scalability, and control the client opted for a bespoke solution rather than off-the-shelf. The primary objective was to minimise their existing manual processes so more time could be spent on customer engagement. With the use of specialist equipment, WITT Gas repair and return products via their ten-step process. As a result of this, the new system needed to support three card types to correspond with the Gas Analyser, Gas Mixer and Leak Detection.
From a commercial standpoint, they required a solution that would record, monitor and alert staff for each product that was returned. Long-term data capture was also essential to oversee key statistics that could be used to monitor trends, provide SLA alerts and identify bottlenecks. Functionally, the solution needed to allow end users to log in to the system via a secure login page with pre-defined roles. Once we had outlined the software development lifecycle into the project phases, our team of graphic designers and front and back-end developers then worked in tangent to mock-up and deliver.
We created a responsive dashboard to highlight the different stages of repair, log data, and alert the team so that they could swiftly update the customer. To build the system we used the latest Microsoft .NET Core 3.1 framework to ensure we could provide an ultra-fast enterprise level solution that would be highly scalable and compatible with hosted servers or Azure/AWS cloud-based services. Dependent on the ‘user role’ the system allows users to perform admin functions, create and edit product returns and view the “returns board” for customer service feedback and engineer updates. The software is also able to assign roles and tasks and register and manage users, filtering by name and other defaults.
Adhering to the predefined requirements, the software is responsive to a range of web devices (tablets, PCs, desktops and 4k screens) with the ability to add, edit and view application parameters. To effectively manage the products in the returns process, the software has configurable system settings to update various alert features. For example, each card has a colour-coded status to indicate the level of attention required.
Since the project has gone live, WITT gas’ processes are much more streamlined and efficient. The use of automation has drastically reduced the amount of manpower, which has subsequently improved the brands overall return on investment. The ability to retrospectively analyse data means that WITT can continuously improve on their processes and the scalability of the solution ensures a long-term impact on capability.