Fletchers Bakeries and Pork Farms make many of the food products that we buy everyday in the supermarkets, whether you are a fan of a pork pie or a nice granary loaf, one of these two companies has probably made it. But with so many food items being sent out to the supermarkets there are always claims coming back in again; these could be as simple as damaged stock or more complicated as the price was incorrect. Being as powerful as they are, the supermarkets simply hold off paying their invoices if there are discrepancies or decide how much they should pay and leave it at that! This means that Fletchers Bakeries and Pork Farms have to work quickly to check all the claims and see if the amounts stated by the supermarkets are in fact correct, or do they owe them money.
When we started on this project the existing system was paper based, and that meant for every claim
someone had to wade through all the invoices and delivery receipts and decide if the claim was justified.
Of course this then meant that the approval had to pass round many people before it was finally given the go ahead, in
some cases three months after the original claim was made. If the claim was found to be incorrect then that meant that
the supermarket had held off payment for a lengthy period.
We decided that the best way to solve this was to remove as much of the paper processing as possible and
to make the whole system run automatically. That meant that the system contacted the next person in line
to make the approval and subsequently reduced the time taken from three months to literally a few days!
Being an Innovate Software design we like to ensure that our products have some innovative touches and
this was no exception. As you can see below we chose to put in a leader board on the main page when the
team logged in so they could see who was the person with the most claims outstanding – this was not a
leader board you wanted to be at the top of!
We also decided that we needed to find an easy way to show the status of all of the claims on the system
without taking up too much space, as you can see below we used a graphical bar to represent this. Each
of the little squares is actually a claim and its colour states whether is on time, getting close to
being late or actually late – simple really, but rather elegant we thought.
Building these interfaces takes time and skill, as you can see below we started out creating a wireframe of the control panel pointing out the key features and to its right you can see how the finished design ending up looking. This process allows us to get the key functionality over to the client quickly to seek their approval whilst providing the graphic designers and developers the time to work on finessing the interface.
