FELIX

FELIX is an award winning transportation intelligence platform trusted by leading shippers in the logistics industry. The platform’s core functionality revolutionizes the approach to the procurement and maintenance of contract freight networks and delivers a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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The main goal of the project was to create a new platform that connected Breakthrough Fuel's current systems - that way, their internal development team could get out of support roles and into feature and product development. It was crucial for us to fully understand a specific and difficult logistics fuel recovery program in order to help dissect and design a new tool that empowered their customer account managers to do strategic work instead of solving minor problems.

One of Breakthrough's most valuable assets is their customer data - so it was critical to make sure that data was properly secured. Users needed to be able to see data from multiple customers at the same time, but ensure a clean separation between each customer. Users also needed to ease into the platform through their role, using what they were specifically trained on.

Throughout the project, we worked with members of several different teams throughout the organization who would eventually transition their entire day to day to FELIX. We conducted interviews to understand the types of data they were interacting with, identify pain points and streamline their workflow within the new platform. In many cases, we spent time demoing features for the teams who would be using them. We would use their feedback to improve the design prototypes in Figma before the development team began building them. This allowed us to make changes at the lowest level of fidelity.

In addition to the internal platform, we were also building a customer-facing experience. With multiple customer types needed, we had to make sure that we always considered each user scenario while designing out the solution. Rather than building three different platforms to serve separate users, we planned to build a single platform. Depending on your role and user status, you could do more work, see more data, and have access to more features.

User profiles need to be granted permissions to various capabilities in the application. Breakthrough needed to be able to control which users had access to what data, at a very nuanced level. On top of the features you had access to, specific data was granted and controlled by the customers. This way, we could control access and data manipulation at a very fine level. Something unique to the FELIX platform is that users can have different roles associated with different customers, or even data within the same customer. For example, a user may have access to reports across an entire customer, but only be allowed to edit a small portion of that customer's data. This made adopting a traditional approach very difficult - so we built authorization from the ground up to create an extremely flexible system that supports the strength of Breakthrough's business.

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A core goal of this endeavor was to remove the need for developers to handle much of the data flowing into the systems and put that power in the hands of more employees. For example, when customer data came into the legacy system, it would go through a series of rules to combine the data into a workable format. These rules were unique to each customer, and were originally built by a developer every time a new one was needed. We brought this rule system to the interface to make it useable for internal users without having to write code.

The level of configuration needed in the old system was extensive. However, most of it wasn't surfaced to the team that was working directly with customers. We had a challenge to take a process that was normally driven by developers and move it to the user interface. This would allow users to drive these configurations without having to get developers involved.

FELIX was shipped in 2020, unlocking a new world of efficiency and innovation at Breakthrough Fuel. In 2021, Breakthrough Fuel was recognized by Fast Company on their list of Most Innovative Companies due to FELIX's powerful Network Intelligence product that leverages millions of data points to assist businesses in swiftly establishing more reliable and streamlined transportation networks.