The initial situation

Is it a familiar situation? Your clothes are piling up at home, there is hardly any space left in the closet. In a free minute, overcome by thirst for action, you finally decide to sort out old clothes. The question remains: where to put it? None of your friends are interested in your old clothes and the next disposal point is too far away.

With TextilTiger, Remondis Digital Services has designed an innovative service to extend the life cycle of clothing and thus close the textile cycle. In the spirit of sustainability and usability, the old bags are picked up with cargo bikes directly from the customer's home. The TextilTiger team needed a modern software solution to coordinate incoming orders and manage the driver fleet.

In addition to the above-mentioned end customers, there are two user groups at TextilTiger who have to work with software for a better user experience. The first is the admin or dispatcher. He sits at the monitor and needs a lot of information and data. He needs a good overview in order to plan the optimal delivery routes. So, he manages both routes and riders. On the other hand, selected information must of course also be passed on to the drivers of the cargo bikes. They pick up the clothes from the customer and are out and about on the streets of Hamburg in all weathers. You should therefore be able to get the necessary information quickly with as few clicks as possible - even in Hamburg weather and with gloves.
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Overall, both user groups need similar information, just prepared differently. This case, therefore, requires an application with different interfaces. We have developed a code-based solution that provides the necessary information to both the dispatcher (on the monitor) and the driver (on the cell phone) in an optimal way.

The implementation

The project was new, our approach known and proven: We started the cooperation with a concept sprint. Given the different user groups, one would certainly have used a web application and a native app in the past - with the latter possibly a separate app for Android and Apple. So you would have needed 2-3 code bases.

For us at SIDESTREAM, however, this does not correspond to the basic principle of pragmatic solutions. We have built a flawlessly functioning web app that also works perfectly on the drivers' cell phones. Thanks to very good requirement engineering, we have understood precisely which user group needs which function and when. Only these are then also displayed. This enables extremely intuitive and fast use -  every second counts here. This helped us to implement tour planning and a rider app.

This automation saves Remondis a lot of manual work and thus time in dispatching. This is also the basis for scaling the service. The most important questions in driver coordination include:

• What should be picked up where and when?
• What capacities are available?

The result or the answer to these questions is clearly displayed as a route on a map.

Collaboration

We delivered the first MVP based on prioritizations that resulted from the concept sprint. The further cooperation took place in two-week sprints with smaller concept sprints in between.

Tech Stack

In this project, we took advantage of the powerful advances in web technologies. With only one code base we implemented the entire product for all users. The advantages: the application is faster, cheaper, and easier to develop and operate.

The Fullstack Typescript application uses the route optimization API of a German provider, with which the best route is calculated. The wheel should not be reinvented here, but rather specialists should be relied upon.

The application runs in the Kubernetes cluster in the MS Azure development by Remondis.