JWV Pork is a large Iowa pork producer based out of Washington, Iowa. Priding themselves on their dedication to high-quality and humane pork production as well as their partners and employees, JWV Pork invested in an upgrade to both their website and their internal process automation. After completing a website project with our WordPress team, JWV worked with the application development team to make life easier for their employees and administrators.
Project Goals
JWV employs drivers, loaders, washers, and receivers to keep their operations running smoothly. Prior to approaching the Webspec team, they coordinated the logistics of drive times, deliveries, and more using a combination of separate spreadsheets. To streamline the process more, they needed a way to integrate logistics planning for each day into an easy-to-use, easy-to-edit platform accessible by all pertinent employees. The resulting web app includes:
- Information collection for drivers’ schedules
- Information collection for washing schedules
- Data collection exportable to payroll system
- Access to real-time logistics and process data
- Access to most up-to-date version of daily schedules from the website or within the app login
Our Strategy
Meeting Priorities
Priority one was that the JWV internal team could keep their process simple while expanding access to more people involved. Before the web application was built, the original workflow for sending out schedules and logistics planning for daily drivers, deliveries, and washes looked something like this:
- One person completes a few excel sheets with lots of macros
- Scheduling person uploads the sheets onto the website
- Scheduling person gets bombarded with messages requesting changes
- Posts an updated schedule at the end of the week
Starting from a Spreadsheet System
How did we start to tackle solving this problem? The answer to that is at the beginning, with the original system! Our team set up a simple importing process of the core spreadsheet so the client could easily start to see improvements in their process.
Building a User Interface
After the initial import of spreadsheet data, our app developers created a user interface that would allow the JWV schedule to make small changes to the schedule and reflect them immediately on the front end for her drivers and loaders. The team continued building the application to support functions that enable JWV to build schedules, delivery tickets, and export details to payroll in order that employees would be paid correctly.
There are many different permission levels, so depending on your job, you see the information that is most important to you. Drivers see different info than loaders, than payroll, than schedulers. There are also many ways to view data and export reports for the internal team at JWV.