Airport & Airline Logistics

The problems that SSE was meant to solve were very complex and so the first step was to map out what was happening.

I did this by creating the resource below, a map of all the different paths a bag goes through within the process of a flight. This was split by location and by process since they answered different angles of the same questions such as:

What problems do we have and where?

How do all of these systems and processes affect each other?

How can they work together better?

Where are there opportunities for collaboration?

With this context it was then time to do the same exercise but from the software perspective.

The big question was how can we take all of these projects that brock has worked on throughout the years and marry them all together into a unified product that is robust but flexible enough to serve all of our customers different needs.

This involved figuring out the existing solutions and their functionality. Then indexing them and figuring out how they could connect in an intelligent way. Duplicate content was removed and consolidated and flexibility was built into areas where we knew it was likely to be required.

After countless iterations and negotiations with different departments we arrived at the structure illustarted in the diagram below.

With all of our building blocks solidly in place we were now ready to create SSE  into the product it was envisioned as. I was tasked with figuring out the color pallet which I designed with data visualization in mind. Below is a snippet of the documentation for the colours chosen.

Common components were also standardized and were built to be configurable fort common use cases. We had the flexibility to customize when necessary but a lot of effort was put into creating a maintainable and well documented library of components.

This sped up the full platform redesign so much and the project was so successful that the component library started being used in Brocks other product such as in the mailing industry.

Claims are machines that collect baggage and sort them out into conveyor belts after flights land at their destination. From there, bags are sorted out and delivered to thousands of people a day. We were dealing with 28 claims.

So how do you convey the information of thousands of bags split into 28 groups, and show their journeys per claim with the added element of a filterable time-frame? All at the same time on the same screen.

The dashboard framework we usually used to design screens is designed to be informative and descriptive.
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However there were use cases that contained so much data that we needed to come up with solutions that showed all the information but also highlighted the important details.

Having the usual details would overload our dashboards and make the screens unusable.

So I had to drown out the noise. Legends and numbers were stripped and the target was normalized as an anchor.

This was a macro level view and so the elements that were usually crucial were now intrusive. Leaving just the essence of the data that was needed on the screen made it clear to see where and when a claim is in trouble.

A screen that is easy to scan makes it easy to anticipate surges in traffic, and in turn leads to much more efficient airports since problems can be addressed before they happen.

At brock I had the opportunity to work on many form factors and for many novel use cases. These included anything from tiny handheld bag scanners, to giant bag carousel screens, to X-Ray displays to a "Wall Of Glass" where an entire room was covered in screens to oversee infrastructure reporting.

Brocks full platform redesign went further than just the main product because every touchpoint and solution we had was part of the experience using Brock Solutions. The dream of a seamless, painless and consistent was coming true.