August 4, 2022
2
min. read
When technical Skills meet Domain Knowledge
Hopefully you’ve noticed that we talk a lot about Logward's Supply Chain Management as a Service offering as a mix of innovation and experience. Wait, was it technology and knowledge? Or digital meets analog?
As much as we hate to admit it, these are just words. The important thing is the meaning behind them, and it is exactly there that we want to dive deeper.
For some of us, especially our tech team, supply chain management is a whole new world. while the other members of the team without a tech background have decades of domain knowledge and by directly supporting our customers they bring useful feedback and insights to our tech team. This combination is important because, by our calculations, understanding the user needs and their context is at least half the work of building great software.
As a matter of fact, even if the purpose of our logistics technology is to create business value, that value cannot be recognized if the specific end user isn’t always kept front-and-center.
More precisely, if programming is essentially translating natural language requirements into machine language routines, our tech team is fluent when it comes to coding and intermediate when talking logistics, while our Customer Success team is fluent in all topics related to supply chain and intermediate when, for example, talking UI. Our CO2 Calculator freebie is a case in point.
When we started building the freebie, we focused on information that the typical user in the industry needs and looks for, but this didn't immediately translate into an easy-to-use product. The UI and UX did not providing an optimal experience yet. This is where the skills of our tech team came in, applied with our Customer Success' logistics knowledge, and made a second iteration to create a freebie that not only is useful but intuitive to use.
Below the CO2 Calculator before and after applying UI understanding to optimize its use.
Another excellent example of how domain knowledge and technical skills meet at Logward is Allocation & Capacity Management, a feature of our Procurement Cloud (read more here). This feature was built to address freight managers' pain points and improve their workflows, thus reducing costs and ensuring cargo delivery OTIF. This understanding of user needs came from the industry experience of our team. Yet, the tech prowess of our engineers turned logistics ideas into actionable software by simplifying data gathering and processing and creating powerful visualization. This results in shippers and freight forwarders having the necessary insights to strategize for future shipments.
All this is not to say we haven’t all been hard at work learning as much as we can, or that those of us with logistics knowledge don’t share it with our tech experts. It’s just that you cannot google yourself to 40+ years of industry experience. What you need is continuous collaboration and exchange of knowledge. And that’s exactly what we do in our team building and Learning Logward sessions, where we're always asking questions.
If you are curious to learn more about how our features meet industry's needs, have a chat with our experts!
Logward is a Hamburg & Bangalore based logistics technology company.
We build software, move containers, and change mindsets.
If you have any questions or just want to say hi, reach out to mail@logward.com. Or you can book time with one of our logistics experts here.