A real-time operations view for a mobile device manufacturer

Context

A mobile device manufacturer’s leadership had no single view across order management and delivery. Problems reached them as escalations — after a customer had already noticed.

The client remains confidential.

Leadership & decisions

Built to spot exceptions, not to report. The obvious brief is a reporting dashboard: totals, charts, a weekly export. That tells you what happened. I directed it instead at the question leadership actually had — what is going wrong right now that I do not know about yet — which changes what you put on the screen and what you leave off.

Real-time against systems that were not built for it. The order and delivery data lived in the client’s existing systems. Surfacing it live meant integrating against those systems as they were, rather than asking a manufacturer to change how it records orders so that a dashboard could read them more easily.

A bird’s-eye view is an editing problem. The value of a leadership view is in what it omits. Deciding what not to show was more of the work than deciding what to show.

Outcome

A real-time view across order management, delivery tracking and issue monitoring, surfacing bottlenecks before they turned into escalations.