On My Way Case Study

The Request

Create a product to digitize National Grid’s scheduling and work assignment process to expedite how fieldworkers get to their jobs, track electric grid outages, and alert supervisors of job completion.

The Details

Coordinating field operations at National Grid relied on an analog approach in a digital age. Assignments were handed out via physical paper hand-offs at local barns, paper was used to capture job close-outs and metering data, and significant time and effort was later put into filing, scanning, and digitizing work, resulting in a slow-moving process prone to errors.

The Challenge

National Grid needed an integrated digital platform to coordinate the efforts of more than 1,100 line workers, 168 supervisors and 100+ Trouble Workers. The platform required seamlessness for everyone involved, with real-time insights into equipment availability and location, the status of different assignments, crew availability and the appropriate documentation for each job.

The Insight

While the size and scale of National Grid’s workflow has steadily grown, the company’s approach to overseeing field operations struggled to keep up with the pace of change. The reliance on paper led to inefficiency and bureaucracy, increasing costs and limiting service quality. Eliminating this dependency would break down barriers for crews and customers, accelerating scheduling of short cycle jobs and enabling supervisors to make timely, data-driven decisions.

The Approach

Giant Machines developed a user-centric product that allows both supervisors and field crews to handle their daily workflows. By building an iPad app, web app, and backend to optimize the way electricity calls are managed by supervisors in the northeast, we were able to replace National Grid’s paper process to remove steps in the process and allow product scalability.

This undertaking depended on integrating National Grid’s current workflow with legacy systems. Working with National Grid’s Digital Board, we were able to understand what ideas could align with existing structures and then undertook a series of validation exercises based around conducting ethnographic research, business case modeling, and technical feasibility.

We focused on the product’s ease of use through product-market fit testing and launch of Alpha and Beta products to gather user feedback and ensure alignment with the business case. With so many goals for the product, we identified initial ways to improve the application quickly. For example, images, icons, and data caused a significant slowdown of the product because it was having to calculate so many things. Switching to a more performant library and strategizing around where we could prioritize breaking monoliths of code into microservices made the product significantly more maintainable.

As we continued to scale, further features and evolutions of the product improved National Grid’s Workflow and continue to do so with iterations rolling out regularly.