Energy / B2B platform

Bitume Online

One order, three trades, one platform.

Bitume Online is the B2B platform through which construction companies order bitumen from an energy group’s sales offices. A first version existed; I worked on the redesign of its flows, in a small feature team with two product owners and a Scrum dev team. One platform for the three people an order goes through — the customer who places it, the sales office that validates it, and the haulier who loads and delivers it. Field research, flow mapping, co-design workshops, prototyping and RITE testing, through to the MVP.

Role: Product designer, research to MVP
Team: Two product owners, Scrum dev team
Users: Customers, sales offices, hauliers

The problem

A first tool existed, but most orders still went through the sales office by phone and email. The office checked stock and quotas, called the haulier for a slot, called the customer back. Three trades with their own rules, no shared view of the order, and sales teams spending their days on the phone instead of selling.

The redesign had to rebuild the flows so customers could order on their own, hauliers could get their loading slots without a call, and the sales office kept control of quotas and validation.

What I did

Field research in three markets. Interviews and on-site observation in France, England and Switzerland: sales office managers, refinery staff, hauliers and customers. Each trade has rules the others don’t see — quotas, loading capacity, truck availability — and the research was about mapping them before drawing anything.

Mapping the order, end to end. From the customer’s request to the truck leaving the refinery: who does what, in which order, and which steps stay on the phone. This map became the backbone of the platform.

A swimlane diagram of one bitumen order — the customer, Bitume Online, the sales office, the haulier and the refinery read across three columns, order, slot and delivery, with six numbered handovers and the off-platform phone calls drawn as dashed lines. — Service mapping

Co-design workshops with the sales office. Everything transits through them: quotas, customer requests, arbitration. Working sessions with the office teams to design their view around that job rather than around the order form.

One view per roleCustomer — a guided request: product, quantity, delivery window, haulier, with current product availability shown alongside.Sales office — the whole order on one page, with validate and decline next to it.Haulier — the loading slots at the refinery as a grid, with the customer’s requested window marked, so the slot is chosen against what the refinery can actually load.

The customer’s view — a bitumen request in four steps, with the month’s available volume standing beside it. — Operator tool, customer view

The sales office view of an order — the customer reference, product and shipping read as one summary, with Validate and Decline standing beside it. — Operator tool, sales view

The haulier’s view — a grid of loading slots for one day at the Normandy refinery, the window the customer asked for marked underneath it, and a comments thread naming the assigned driver. — Operator tool, haulier view

RITE testing. One week, alternating a day of testing with a day of prototyping. Most usability issues surfaced and were fixed within that week, and the fixes went straight into the sprint with the dev team.

ShippedFlow map of the order across the three tradesOne platform, a dedicated view per roleRequest, validation and slot-booking flowsTested prototype, handed off for the MVP

Outcome

An MVP the sales offices could rely on. Customers place and track their orders themselves, hauliers book their slots in the tool, and the sales office keeps control of quotas and validation — with less of the day spent on the phone.

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