Back

Logistics Management Platform

@ Airspace

Airspace is a time critical logistics business, shipping urgent goods on the next flight out. The complexity of these shipments created a situation that reduced the efficiency, reliability and margin of many orders. To improve the business process and increase efficiency, I led a team through an end to end overhaul of the product. We produced - and patented- a novel logistics management system that automates complex processes using a multipart product architecture. This platform not only streamlines manual operations but also positions Airspace as a leader in time-critical logistics.

The Problem

Airspace is a time-critical logistics business that specializes in shipping urgent goods such as medical supplies, transplant organs, and airplane parts globally. In this industry, balancing efficiency in speed and cost with reliable, high-quality service is crucial. A single misplaced or delayed package can tarnish a customer's perception, overshadowing the performance of other deliveries.

Airspace serves highly specialized customers that typically have specific requirements for their orders that create new challenges. Getting the package to its destination on time is important - but making sure to add the right amount of dry ice, packaging it in the right way, notifying the right people of any delays, etc, are equally critical to ensuring a successful delivery. For instance, a medical facility might require urgent delivery of transplant organs with precise temperature control and immediate notifications of any transit delays. Not only do these complicate the fulfillment of an order, but these factors can also make it more difficult for a customer to place orders and receive an accurate quote and bill.

All of these factors created significant scaling challenges for Airspace. When the order volume was low, it was feasible to throw a team of highly skilled operations specialists at the problem to monitor each order. As the business scaled to handle thousands of orders daily, the use of highly trained specialists became a huge bottleneck. Handling errors and delays could overwhelm the operations team, increasing the likelihood of further mistakes on unrelated orders. These costly errors both strained customer relationships and also damaged Airspace’s revenue growth and margin.

Faced with these challenges, I led a team of designers and developers to innovate and streamline Airspace’s operations. We employed a series of high-velocity, high-impact innovation sprints - a blend of user research, design sprints and agile development. Through this initiative we redefined the state-of-the-art logistics system and secured a patent. In turn, this new system measurably improved customer outcomes as well as Airspace’s bottomline.

Innovation Sprints provide a standard blueprint for high velocity, high impact validated product ideas.

Process

To tackle Airspace's complex challenges, I initiated a series of innovation sprints, a unique process I developed combining user research and design sprints. This process brings designers, developers, and researchers into a high-impact, rapid progression from problem identification to solution development. Each innovation sprint follows a structured yet flexible format. They typically start with 2-4 weeks of intensive user research followed by 2-4 weeks of design and development. In this process teams are given a chance to develop a shared point of view on a complex problem, before collaborating on iterative and evidence-based experimentation to test potential solutions. The output of these sprints is a rich portfolio of rigorously tested product designs and proof-of-concepts.

A crucial first step in this project was to define and manage the scope of the broad mandate of “operational efficiency.” After collaborating with product managers and conducting some preliminary research, I developed a roadmap to focus our sprints on three key areas: the operations team, the finance team, and the customer experience. Each area, while contributing to overall efficiency, was distinct enough for its own targeted innovation sprints. Preliminary research revealed that communication patterns between these functional domains —and the breakdowns therein— were critical for determining organizational efficiency. We began with the operations team, before moving onto finance and customer facing innovation sprints.

Key Findings

Our research across the three areas of operations, finance, and customer experience yielded several key findings that shaped our solution designs:

Unstructured information permeated the Airspace operations - from complex SOPs to order specific special instructions. This often derailed automation during order fulfillment.

Key Finding #1: Unstructured information derailed automation and caused manual errors

A major challenge that we identified in our research was the pervasive impact of unstructured - or poorly structured - information on the fulfillment process. This problem began with non-standard customer requirements being gathered during onboarding and order placement. Customer requirements were typically captured in long SOPs and special instructions for orders. Automated systems could not process this information in any meaningful way, requiring manual intervention to correct many orders.

After orders were completed the manual process continued: for every order the operations and finance teams manually identified any charges that needed to be applied for services rendered. Due to the unstructured information driving orders, most of these charges could not be automatically accounted for. This manual intervention was highly error prone and could lead to both customer dissatisfaction from unexpected charges and revenue loss. As a result the operations and finance teams were left overburdened and stressed, inaccurate revenue projections became the norm, and our technology was left hobbled by unpredictable order requirements.

A summary of the negative feedback loop Airspace encountered, from a presentation summarizing research findings

Key Finding #2: Demand for R&D resources outstripped supply

The unstructured information problem had a second order effect: The demand for R&D resources, driven by the need to address emerging customer problems, often exceeded supply. This led to a mentality of prioritizing quick-fix solutions that, while well-intentioned, resulted in disjointed user experiences, unmet requirements, and reduced ROI. As this web of stop-gap features grew, seemingly simple tasks became caught in hidden layers of complexity. Simple changes, such as adding a checkbox to an order form, could balloon to months-long projects, further straining R&D resources.

This created a disjointed experience for operations users that heightened cognitive load - driving higher switching costs between fulfillment steps and decreasing operational efficiency. Hidden complexity could cause seemingly straightforward operations tasks to take far longer than expected to complete. Development fixes for these problems often languished in backlogs for months. The result was a self-perpetuating proliferation of unhandled exceptions and system complexity.

To complete most actions on an order, the operations team would need to memorize complex strings of actions scattered throughout the interface

Key Finding #3: Manual Repetitive Processes became the stopgap solution

In response to these challenges, operational teams adopted manual, repetitive processes as a “temporary” fix, although these often became semi-permanent processes. The customer success, finance and operations teams became scrappy problem solvers - creating spreadsheets and flow charts they could use to attempt to keep track of complex order requirements.

While showcasing the creativity of these teams, these methods proved to be error-prone and difficult to scale. As order volumes grew many of these processes broke down and needed to be updated. Training and retraining team members on new processes became increasingly expensive and difficult, which in turn made it difficult to assess the ability to meet the demands of prospective customers. As a result, new customers were regularly turned away due to a fear that the operational process could not keep up with the requirements of their orders, significantly slowing revenue growth.

Design Solutions

In response to the challenges identified, my team and I conducted dedicated design sprints for the operations, customer success, and finance teams, aiming to develop innovative solutions tailored to each domain. Each larger innovation sprint was structured to produce a diverse portfolio of design ideas. These ranged from incremental improvements to existing systems to the development of new, system-level patterns.

Our portfolio-of-solutions approach was instrumental in facilitating an agile implementation strategy. It allowed us to identify and capitalize on quick wins, providing immediate value while laying the groundwork for more comprehensive system changes. This case study will primarily focus on the overarching design patterns and their significant impacts, illustrating how these innovations transformed Airspace’s approach to fulfilling orders and improving overall operational efficiency.

Each part of the Services-Attributes-Task system interacts cleanly to accelerate solution delivery.

System Architecture Design

Though each design sprint focused on specific user groups, we adhered to a unified system strategy to tackle the core issue of unstructured information in the fulfillment process. This used a domain driven design that isolated the missing concepts implicit in user workflows and mapped out their communication patterns across finance, customer and operations processes.

At a high level, we developed a communication pattern built around three key concepts:

Services - units of work that can be sold with associated charges and provide structure for complex customer requirements with clean unambiguous modules.
Attributes - customer facing choices on the order form that added or removed services, eliminating the reliance on manually typed special instructions and providing a clean order form experience.
Task workflows - guided series of semi-automated decision prompts queued up by the services required by an order, reducing the training required for the operations team and amplifying their actions with automated macros.

Collectively, these elements formed a robust framework that structured order data, driving both automation and accuracy in the fulfillment and finance processes. Colloquially this became known within the organization as “SATs” (Services, Attributes, Tasks). This provided a shared parlance that team members could use to discuss potential solutions and new services for customers (e.g. "Could we make a SAT to solve this?"). Additionally, each design area provided value and could stand alone - allowing independent development teams to work in parallel, delivering value while also building towards a shared strategic system objective.

Testing with paper prototypes allowed users creative freedom during early stage concept testing

We validated and refined these high level concepts through a series of paper-prototype workshops with target users across departments. Although we tested these concepts in a variety of ways, traditional linear prototypes were challenging because of the flexibility we aimed to enable with the system. To provide users with the ability to experience the creativity this system design would wenable I used a “wizard of oz” testing process. This consisted of creating a tabletop card game simulating the overall system logic. Each concept that users could create were represented as slips of paper they could fill out and add to orders as needed, while the researchers enforced the rules of the game. This allowed users to get creative with the prototype, and offered my team a view into how users might engage with the system in a realistic way. This allowed us to iterate on the high level system design without being bogged down too early in nitty gritty UI decisions.

From there, we were ready to move onto more detailed designs for each of the sub-domains. With the high level system architecture validated, the goal for each domain specific innovation sprint was to flesh out the key concepts relevant to that specific domain. This approach allowed us to establish the core communication pattern first, and then create domain specific interface and sub-system components that fulfilled the needs of the finance, customer order form, and operations sub-domains.

Finance System Designs

At the core of the business logic were designs related to “services” - modular units of work that defined what would be done on an order. Services could be created through one dedicated system, and provide a translation mechanism for fulfillment requirements across domains. By providing an extensible framework to model specific customer requirements as well defined units, services provided a tool to structure much of the unstructured information at the heart of Airspace’s process. This provided a scaffolding on which other logic could be connected - both within the finance domain and across other functional areas.

Services can be created to package complex SOP logic into reusable units.

Services can then be added to customer specific rate sheets to define associated pricing.

Services can be easily created, assigned to customers, and given pricing logic through a user friendly interface - bringing order to the pricing chaos.

Through a series of dedicated design sprints we arrived at design patterns where customers could have rate sheets associated with their accounts - allowing for clean, shared pricing logic. These rate sheets could have services and regions associated with them and then users could define specific per service pricing using a series of modular charge types and conditions. This flexible toolkit was easily expanded over time, and allowed the system to have a high degree of agile responsiveness. Although the initial MVP offered simple charge types like flat fees, over time this toolkit was expanded to include more advanced conditions as needs were identified. This modular approach is often key to enabling teams to tackle big problems in a way that minimizes time to value - splitting the difference between waterfall and agile practices.

These designs empowered the finance team to gain control of the pricing process. The flexible charge systems allowed existing services to have pricing automated more accurately. Rather than fighting to fit pricing logic into an out of sync system that needed to be manually corrected each month, the service and rate sheet system allowed the finance experts to dial in the pricing logic upfront. This change led to more accurate quotes for customers and more rapid revenue recognition via far more efficient billing cycles. It eliminated the need for the finance team to spend weeks of time every month reviewing and manually fixing the bills for orders. The new automated system helped shorten the billing cycle from around 15 days to just a few days, and with far greater accuracy in the resulting charges.

Additionally, the ability for customers to share pricing sheets unlocked the ability to make organization wide strategic pricing decisions. Although large customers would often have unique rate sheets negotiated (utilizing the flexibility of the system), the majority of medium and small business customers were standardized to a few pricing tiers. The rate sheet system made it feasible for the organization to renegotiate rates and snap low volume customers to higher rates. By eliminating grandfathered discounts, revenue from the SMB customer segment was increased by around 20% - constituting several million dollars a year. Achieving this “quick win” set the stage for enabling a more comprehensive communication pattern across the product with services.

Operations System Design

The second domain that we addressed with a dedicated innovation sprint was the operations user experience. The operations team was swimming in complexity from the unstructured data, and bore the brunt of the repetitive tasks that were needed to complete orders. They spent long hours training and memorizing complex routines and decision logic, and had to read the customer specific requirements for every order. This left them burnt out, overwhelmed and prone to making errors on simple tasks by the end of their shift. Given the high stakes, life or death nature of many orders, these simple mistakes could leave lasting impacts on the operations team - and life changing implications for the end customers who’s transplant surgeries had been disrupted. Our design process honed in on the core of their struggles, and arrived at a powerful solution to streamline their efforts in the form of guided task workflows and a flexible workflow builder for the operations leadership.

The task system presents Operations users with a single area to take action, and guided step by step instructions making it clear what to do next on an order.

With this solution, the operations team no longer needed to memorize decision trees and manually type out reasons why they did certain actions as notes. Instead the system can present step by step instructions for each action and automatically record what decision was made. The services that are added to an order determine the relevant prompts that are to be shown. These instructions appear as to-do items for the operations team.

As an example, the operations team could be presented with a manual action such as - “Call the driver and ask about their ETA. Will they be there within 30 minutes? (Yes) (No).” If the operations team clicks “no” and the customer has a “Notify if pickup delayed” service, then it could create a follow up task automatically directing the operations team to notify the customer of the delay. This solution was inspired by the workflow-like diagrams that the operations team had created for themselves to provide structure for order requirements - and supercharged it by allowing the product to guide them through key decisions automatically.

A flexible task builder environment allows the complex logic behind each service to be visualized, updated and automated.

In addition to automated reminders, the modular approach to the task workflow builder allows frequently completed tasks to be automated over time. These automations include a variety of logical decision points and triggers, such as automatically detecting if an order is flying into a certain airport or has reached a certain order status. These remove the need for the operations team to manually monitor orders in most cases. Additionally, actions could be automated directly - such as sending text messages, adding notes, escalating an order, etc. These help relieve the pressure of the repetitive tasks the operations team is faced with and allow them to deal with more complex situations rather than routine ones. Together these automation capabilities allowed the per staff order count to double, while reducing controllable service failures by 95% on workflows that were automated.

The task builder and task workflow systems, working in concert with the services framework directing which task workflows are activated for orders, provide a powerful way for logistics operations to be automated. It also provided a powerful tool for the operations management team to guide their staff in new ways. Whereas previous changes to standard processes required extensive training, and were difficult to track, changes to task logic in a workflow system could be disseminated instantly on all relevant orders. This quality became a powerful asset allowing the management of workflows to be democratized among operations managers.

As part of the delivery of the feature, I trained a dozen operations team managers on how to build and update task workflows. The system quickly became a shared language that they could use with stakeholders across the organization to map out proposed business logic changes. With these powerful systems in place, just one last piece of the puzzle remained: how to get clean data about order requirements from customers at the outset of orders to drive subsequent automation.

Customer Order Form System

With the underlying finance and operations infrastructure in place to handle a wide array complex logistics requirements, I led a team in designing a corresponding customer facing feature. The goal of this feature was to provide a translation layer between customers placing orders and the underlying services and tasks to fulfill these requirements. This would allow Airspace to provide different customers with different order forms that met their specific needs, but still fulfill those with one underlying process. To achieve this we designed and developed a feature called “order attributes” over the course of several design sprints.

With the attributes system, customer order forms can be customized by adding customer specific form fields. These in turn automatically activate services and tasks to drive order fulfillment and pricing.

Order attributes consist of customizable order form fields of various types - from drop boxes, to checkboxes, to numeric entry fields. These can then have configurable logic on the back end that the customer success team can use to connect those choices through to a relevant service. In turn, once a service is added to the order via the attributes, the relevant charges and operational task logic are activated automatically. Using this system, customer success was able to fine tune customer order forms during onboarding by selecting the relevant attributes. The attribute system uses a modular design, providing both standard attributes and custom attributes that can be created for a specific customer’s use case.

This provided a number of benefits for customers and internal teams. First, it dramatically simplified the order placement and training process for customers. Rather than having to type in special instructions, customers could instead be given a bespoke checkbox or dropdown for their use case - enabling an ease of use that surpassed the industry standard. Second, it allowed services to be reflected upfront in the price and timing quotes for an order. This improved the perceived accuracy - and trustworthiness - of the prices that Airspace could offer customers. Rather than quotes being regarded as “mostly wrong” by customers because details were unaccounted for, the order form was able to show that specific requirements had been factored into the provided timeline and price, reinforcing customer trust.

When it all comes together, the finance, customer and operations modules produce a clean system for bringing new services to market in a scalable fashion.

Finally, the flexibility of the order attribute system, paired with the internal services and task workflow systems backing it up, allowed the business to quickly prototype and demo new solutions and product offerings to customers. When going to demo to a new customer, the services-attributes-task system made it trivial for Airspace to create a proof of concept for their unique use case, allowing Airspace’s service and product to stand out from the crowd. This became a powerful tool for the sales team to close deals - and to help expand into new lines of business with existing customers. The order attributes system worked in concert with the services and tasks systems to provide a comprehensive approach to improving operational efficiency.

The original goal of the designs were exceeded - customer needs could be addressed rapidly with a repeatable system and far less development and operations overhead.

Impact

Taken together, the Services Attributes and Task system positively impacted Airspace in a number of profound ways. Each individual system on its own provided benefits:

The services and ratesheets system standardized pricing, increasing the efficiency of closing the books by upwards of 50% (from up to 15 days a month to bill customers to just a few days each month). At the same time, rate sheets allowed unruly pricing for hundreds of SMB customers to be renegotiated - generating several million dollars a year in new revenue.

The Task Workflow system automated menial tasks in the operations process, enabling the efficient scaling of the business from $20 million a year in revenue to $100 million with only marginal increases in operations staffing. The operations team members had a significant burden lifted from them micromanaging these details of orders, and were able to focus on more important aspects of work.

At the same time, the task system improved the quality of orders - decreasing service failures on automated services by 95%. Customer’s immediately noticed the improved service quality when their orders were digitized with the SAT system. Not long after automating key workflows, customers would begin commenting that previous issues had been resolved. Chronic pain points had been resolved through the automated SAT system.

The Order Attributes system improved customer satisfaction and ease of onboarding, and reduced miscommunication risks from manually typed instructions.

Best of all, these benefits to the usability and operational efficiency of Airspace's process delivered iteratively over time, using a high velocity innovation process.

The overall system working together provides high level strategic benefits that are difficult to quantify. The modular design of each subsystem allows the R&D team to extend them much more reliably and flexibly, dropping the average cost of delivering complete solutions. In turn, this builds trust in R&D with the rest of the organization. The system provides a rapid response mechanism - allowing what would have been prohibitively expensive endeavors to be done rapidly and efficiently.

For example, one Friday afternoon, a $2 Million annual deal was about to fall through. In the customer's pilot shipments a recurring verification step kept being missed - a third party courier partner was delivering the wrong package over and over again. Training and new development were infeasible and it seems inevitable that we would lose the deal. But, I was able to step in and work with a product manager to use the Services and Tasks system to create a solution before the close of business that day. In just a few hours, we solved the problem and saved the deal. Needless to say, the customer was impressed. Stories like this became commonplace after the SAT system came online - it allowed Airspace to quickly identify and respond to customer needs, seizing market opportunities as they arose.

Airspace's patent for an industry leading logistical management system.

The flexibility of the system allowed subject matter experts in customer success, finance and operations to express their needs directly through the product, allowing their expertise to be efficiently harnessed by Airspace’s automation suites. The system overall provided a powerful new story for Airspace to sell on - doubling down on its position as the most advanced tech enabled time critical logistics provider.

To lock in the competitive advantage provided by the SAT system, Airspace patented the technology in 2023, (Logistical Management System, Patent #11,657,364 B1). With this patent secured, Airspace maintains a defensible position as a leader in complex time critical logistics space. The Services Attributes and Task system provides a rock solid foundation on which Airspace can scale and pursue its mission of providing the best possible time critical logistics services.

Back to home Next case study