When Steve Jobs had the initial iPhone prototypes built, he started using it. Scratches on the screen annoyed him—and the ultimate design was improved. An article in Business Insider told the tale this way:

Steve had been using a prototype iPhone for a few weeks, carrying it around in his pocket. When his lieutenants were assembled, he pulled the prototype out of his pocket and pointed angrily to dozens of scratches on its plastic screen. People would carry their phones in their pockets, Steve said. They would also carry other things in their pockets--like keys.

And those things would scratch the screen. And then, with Apple just about to ramp up iPhone production, Steve demanded that the iPhone's screen be replaced with un-scratchable glass, "I want a glass screen," Steve is quoted as saying. "And I want it perfect in six weeks."

Apple sourced the glass from Corning, an American company. To get product in time, Apple ended up working with a Chinese manufacturer to get a factory built, and to get a team of engineers to figure out how to make the new screens work. Within weeks, iPhones were rolling off the lines. "Three months later, Apple had sold 1 million iPhones," the article said. "Four years later, Apple has sold ~200 millions of them."

In this case, because it was a consumer product, the issues were easy to identify. However, if the company hadn't done their work, the iPhone may not have become a household name all over the world. In the business-to-business (B2B) sector, where a product is very specialized, this type of iterative innovation is less common.

In the B2B space, then, it's critical to have structure and process in place to get feedback from end users to support innovation and ensure proper change management to allow input to be incorporated. Without help, adoption can get stuck. This can take many forms, from a suggestion box or web site that collects feedback to longer user-input sessions. Usually, IT and business groups are moving these processes ahead. The engineers are smart but tend to make things too technical and complicated because for smart people complicated things are easy to do. Operations, meanwhile, adopts a Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS) approach that dumbs down everything. You can capture the best of both of these worlds by experienced operations guys or even consultants that have deployed many operational capabilities. They can look at the end product before deployment and provide feedback, discerning whether it makes sense for their users, before doing the department wide roll out. By addressing user feedback, this team can make the change management phase of the project easier and ensure smooth adoption.

So that is why we took a lot of time to thoroughly analyze the UI UX of LoadProof and came up with very simple set of steps to do the following :

In a quicker way, without requiring training, without having to read a complicated manual, without requiring any hand holding, everything is same as a consumer  app in your personal smart phone.

Also, if there is an exception that was reported, automatically provide all these photos that were taken at the hand off points of the other legs of the whole journey to other parties or the insurance companies involved in the Supply Chain community, so the exception can be quickly addressed, and the concerned parties are compensated accordingly. 

Also, during this pandemic, we saw how useful the no touch bill of lading was. A bill of lading or a shipping manifest is a legal document that is required by every transportation service provider, a truck or a carrier to carry it along with them to demonstrate to a law enforcement officer that they are hauling a merchandise that is legally allowed, or if it is a controlled substance they do have all the relevant documentation like a Drug Enforcement Administration certificate or anything else, the problem is this was always a paper document, that the truck drivers need to carry it along with them until the transportation is complete and also attach it to a proof of delivery document with the signature of the recipient. Now with this being paper, with them carrying around in their hands, was spreading the Covid 19 virus, so it made sense to carry it electronically and share it as well as get it signed on a no touch basis wither by emailing and or texting to perform all those steps. So, at that time sharing these documents as photos was quite useful. 

The other area where these photographs, videos and documents are useful are for better Supply Chain Visibility. By reading the contents of the different  documents along with the context and along with the GPS coordinates and the actors that are taking the photos several insights can be obtained on the on-time delivery of the shipments, missed appointments, even traffic patterns around the area where the delivery needs to happen and this whole repository can act as a massive reservoir of data, where even status of purchase orders can be inferred. These data will be highly useful in case of an exception that occurred due to some kind of an outage of a specific service that is essential for a normal functioning of the Supply Chain. Also now running AI and ML models on this data with additional information such as weather at that location at that time, interruptions to Supply Chains can be forecasted, against which operators within those Supply Chains can be better prepared to address any exceptions that might arise. 

So now realizing all these opportunities, the organizations that are currently installing systems and infrastructure to house such a data repository need to include  these photographs and videos within their data architecture so that they can nicely leverage the opportunities available with such a system and also can integrate with the other systems in order to maximize this data culture-based approach.