Overview
Parcel Connect helps matchmake drivers to rental vans and parcels to deliver for Amazon amongst various firms requiring delivery services. The firm operates out of 27 locations in the regions of London, Northern Ireland, Wiltshire, Devon and Norfolk as well as some EU countries. I joined the team in late 2018 to reimagine the onboarding process for new and existing employees. Prior to this project, the firm was operating on dated methods of onboarding including faxing documents and storing only hard copies of vital pieces of information. This resulted in difficulties transferring drivers from one depot to another, visibility on new hires for depot managers and data being stored for longer than stated.
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MARCH 2021-PRESENT
Timeline
November 2018 - April 2020
MARCH 2021-PRESENT
Team
User Interface Designer
Role
CTO 🇬🇧, 4 engineers 🇩🇪, 4 depot managers 🇧🇬, 2 designers 🇬🇧 (incl. me)
Simplifying onboarding experiences.
MARCH 2021-PRESENT
Parcel Connect UK Logistics
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Initial Exploration & Ground Work
MARCH 2021-PRESENT
To understand the everyday challenges and workflow, we made a visit to one of the depots and shadowed the workflow of a depot manager. As opposed to traditional methods of user research or persona mapping, this gave us a greater insight into the nature of data we're recording, transferring and discarding as well as the roadblocks faced by all stakeholders.
We reviewed the existing process behind onboarding new drivers and collecting vital pieces of data including drug & alcohol tests and criminal record checks. It became apparent how information was being misplaced, stored incorrectly or delaying the onboarding process. From a depot manager's perspective, there was very limited visibility into other depots, manager details and headcount which made it increasingly difficult to align our drivers with Amazon's task and route flow.
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Smooth onboarding
Prior to our product, all driver data was stored in a mix of hard drives. excel sheets and saved on local areas. This made it difficult to track the progress of a driver's application, missing documents and onboarding activity.
MARCH 2021-PRESENT
A landing page was created to collect all the necessary information to facilitate this process. All uploaded documents were then stored in the cloud to ensure data was handled per GDPR regulations.
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Visibility into all onboarded drivers
Depot managers and recruitment teams expressed their difficulty with not having visibility into the overall headcount and areas served.
MARCH 2021-PRESENT
To tackle this, we sorted the data based on the dependency of completely onboarding drivers into one central database. This allowed managers to locate information to assist with incident reporting, PCN transfers and inter-depot transfers.
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Inter-depot visibility
Depot managers and recruitment teams expressed their difficulty with not having visibility into the overall headcount per depot and easy access to driver data.
MARCH 2021-PRESENT
To tackle this, we created a digital dashboard accessed from our landing page containing real-time information on hiring activity.
Visibility into pending activity
As depot managers and recruitment teams were storing information on local areas or handling onboarding via email, this made it difficult to track the progress of pending applications and requests.
MARCH 2021-PRESENT
Following my first-hand experience in the office and interviews with stakeholders, this appeared to be the most challenging task to monitor and complete. Based on the status of an application, a queue was created on the initial landing page to track and complete pending action items.