Discovery study for a new order and transport planning system
From legacy workflows to future-ready requirements
Construction and logistics | March -> June 2025
Why this mattered
For one of Northern Europe’s largest construction groups, critical operations in the concrete business depended on an outdated order and planning system. The tool was being decommissioned, leaving workflows fragile: orders were hard to manage, transport planning was inefficient, and key updates had to be handled manually.
The stakes were high. A future system needed to serve multiple roles — from drivers and planners to managers and IT — while supporting thousands of orders and transports each year. Without a structured discovery, a replacement risked repeating old mistakes and locking the business into costly inefficiencies. Our task was to uncover user needs, align stakeholders, and define requirements that would shape a system ready for the future.
MY ROLE
UX & Service Designer, leading discovery and strategy together with a colleague.
THE PROBLEM
The company relied on a legacy order and planning system that was being phased out. Core processes — from order intake to transport scheduling — were fragmented, inefficient, and dependent on manual workarounds. Without a structured discovery, there was a real risk that future investments would miss user needs and business value.
THE OUTCOME
A service blueprint, 200+ prioritized requirements, and a strategic roadmap that provided a solid foundation for procurement and future implementation.
KEY LEARNING
Strategic discovery is about translation: turning complex processes and user pain points into clear, actionable requirements that bridge business goals, frontline needs, and technical feasibility.
How we kicked things off
We kicked off the discovery as a small cross-functional team: myself and a fellow UX designer driving the user and business perspective, alongside a solution architect focusing on the technical track. Together, we set out to understand how the current order and planning system was used in practice — and what the future needed to look like.
-> Our first step was to bring stakeholders together in a series of digital workshops. With participants spread across different locations in Sweden, these sessions helped us capture business goals, pain points, and opportunities. One of the key activities was a service blueprint, where we mapped the process from bidding to invoicing and highlighted where manual workarounds had effectively become “the system.”
-> With that foundation, we moved into field visits and interviews three different sites. Speaking directly with sales, planners, and managers among others gave us an unfiltered look at the everyday friction: orders that had to be moved manually between factories, planning boards that couldn’t adapt to last-minute changes, and the lack of real-time updates that forced people to rely on phone calls.
-> In parallel, we conducted a benchmark of comparable industry tools, analyzing how other players approached planning, automation, and customer-facing features. These references helped broaden the discussion and anchored our recommendations in what was already working elsewhere.
Finally, we collaborated closely with our solution architect, making sure that the requirements we captured could be grounded in technical feasibility and aligned with the company’s IT ecosystem.
This combination of digital workshops, fieldwork, benchmarking, and technical alignment gave us both depth and breadth: the lived reality of drivers and planners, the strategic ambitions of management, and the technical foundation to support them.
Snippet of Service Blueprint.
When workarounds become the system
From the discovery, a clear picture began to emerge. While the existing system supported the basics of order intake and transport planning, it left critical gaps that users had been forced to bridge with manual fixes and workarounds.
User experience
-> The interface was outdated, hard to navigate, and too rigid to support real-world workflows. Simple features like a calendar view could have saved hours of manual checking and reduced errors.
Order & transport planning
-> Shifting orders between factories or adjusting timelines rarely worked as intended, forcing planners to manually correct errors. When drivers called in sick, there was no easy way to reassign jobs in real time — coordination depended on phone calls and patchwork solutions.
Real-time visibility
-> Producers could track trucks returning via a map view, but lacked smart notifications or predictive tools. This made it hard to optimize production timing or adapt to changing conditions.
User management
-> Even simple tasks, like adding a new user, required multiple steps and external dependencies. Flexibility was limited, and the system couldn’t scale with business needs.
System lifecycle
-> Perhaps the biggest gap was structural: the system itself was being phased out, making a replacement not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity.
These insights made it clear: any new solution had to do more than replicate existing functionality. It needed to address the real bottlenecks — inefficiencies, lack of automation, and missing real-time support — while creating space for smarter, more future-ready workflows.
"Vårt ledord är work-arounds"
Order Manager
Turning pain points into a roadmap
Insights alone weren’t enough — we needed to translate them into something tangible the business could act on. Together with our solution architect, we turned user stories, frustrations, and ambitions into a structured set of requirements.
In total, we captured 200+ requirements, organized into categories that spanned the full process:
Order management —
from intake to validation, with automation to reduce manual errors.
Transport planning —
flexible scheduling, real-time updates, and support for last-minute changes.
Invoicing —
automated flows, digital approvals, and clear traceability.
Customer experience —
digital interfaces with real-time order status and transparent communication.
Driver support —
digital work orders, smoother reporting, and mobile-friendly flows.
Our role was to structure and categorize the requirements in a way that made them actionable. The client then used this foundation to prioritize what was critical for the first procurement phase versus what could follow later.
This structured roadmap gave the client not only a list of features, but also a clear vision of how a new system could deliver efficiency, resilience, and growth.
Snippet of requirements per category.
Laying the foundation for change
By the end of the discovery, we had delivered more than just documentation. The outcome was a shared understanding across roles — from drivers and planners to managers and IT — of what the future system needed to support.
Our final delivery included
A service blueprint mapping the current and future state.
A set of 200+ categorized requirements spanning functional, non-functional, and technical needs.
A strategic roadmap outlining next steps for procurement and implementation.