Team Resilience

Van Gelder Groep

The Digital Equipment Book: Less costs, more rented equipment.

100+
UX Testers
4 screens
with highly complex responsiveness
4 weeks
time to market

Services

Full-service infrastructure partner

The infra partner for the Netherlands

The Van Gelder Groep, is a one of the largest Dutch Full-service infrastructure partners. Their equipment service makes sure everybody in the field can work with the best and safest equipment. From the biggest steam rollers to the tiniest screws, they have it covered.

Challenge

Van Gelder is growing fast. Because of that their material service is facing new challenges. One thing stood out: the people in the field didn’t know what equipment they could rent.

For two years, Van Gelder had been working on an application that could keep up with the demand. But with over 7500 pieces of equipment that proved to be quite the task. Eventually they reached out to us for support.

Together we worked on the development of the Digital Equipment Book. We started with a clear definition of the challenge and involved the key users in the company directly.

Solution

A custom app that really hit the mark in only 6 weeks. Here's how we did it:

We started by defining Van Gelder’s requirements. Then we created a prototype in a Design Sprint . We wanted to make sure the features of the new app are in line with what end users are looking for. That’s why we invited them to help us with our user research. This helped us find the best architecture to simplify searching for equipment.

The Digital Equipment Book offers a lot of benefits:

Quick and clear equipment details, pricing, and its included material.
Simple navigation and an option to search.
A CO2 score per piece of equipment.
Information about equipment safety.
A beautiful and intuitive design.
It works on all sizes; mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Beautiful and intuitive design

Architecture that lasts

During the process we involved the users to help establish the best architecture for easy equipment search.

What I especially appreciate about the Team Resilience design sprints is the rapid development with input from key users. They bring different specialists for this, like specialists who have the skill to listen to all the needs of end users.

Evert Mekking, Head of Equipment Service, Van Gelder Groep

Involving the users

A user friendly fully customized solution Features of the Digital Equipment Book application include:

Real-time access to equipment’s details, pricing, and its included material.
Search and navigation function between layers of analyzed categorization.
Information about the equipment score on the CO2 performance ladder and a filter to select electrical equipment only.
Quick access to equipment safety and usability information.
Optimized user interface
Responsive application for all devices; mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Carousel of new products and products picked from random categories at the homepage, so that the user is familiarized with the several types of equipment Van Gelder Groep offers.

Results

The results have been impressive:

Less calls from employees looking for equipment information.
More equipment rentals because of clear prices including all extra expenses like fuel and insurance fees. Cost savings through more accurate project calculations.
Employees make more and better use of equipment.
Clear insight into what equipment is available
More available data to act on. This has already helped to show that central storage of equipment might not be working in their favor. The company is now considering setting up several more warehouses.
Quick adoption by people in the field.
Quick access from any device.
The new style guide was well received and is now a blueprint for Van Gelder apps to follow.

The Digital Equipment Book is live, and already proving of service. This first step has been a big success. Van Gelder Groep is now looking into new features like planning and digitizing the whole rental process.