Jebsen and Jessen

Digitizing the Global Trading Value Chain

1st

INTERNALLY-BUILT TECH PRODUCT

MONTHS FROM KICK-OFF TO MVP

EFFORT REDUCTION DURING MVP TEST

The ask

Help digitize Jebsen & Jessen’s processes and enable new revenue streams.

The Solution

A ready-to-use MVP of Dashport built and launched in under 6 months.

Background

Global trading goes back millenia and is today one of the world’s most saturated industries. To remain relevant in this market, trading companies know that their thinking must evolve. Less of the same, more unconventional solutions. Jebsen & Jessen, a well-established player in the trading space, realized the need to become future-proof, which is when they called us.

Picture of a whiteboard with many sticky notes

The Challenge

From product sourcing and freighting to document exchange and communication management, Jebsen & Jessen operates along the entire trading value chain. The company also works with a multitude of products like chemicals, textiles, garnet sand, etc., and have used traditional paper-work administration for over 70 years.

MVP Factory was asked for support to build an agile, efficient and scalable innovation process to evaluate ideas within a few weeks, validate them in the market through rapid prototyping and bring those with the greatest potential to market - along with the associated business model. And to do all this in a smart and efficient way, to operate scientifically, make decisions based on hypothesis validation and strong customer involvement, and then launch promising cases as MVP’s on the market.

Realizing that this method was stopping them from growing, Jebsen & Jessen reached out to us to help digitize their complex value chain. The task not only included a complete digital redesign of their processes, but also the creation of new revenues. Our response was simple. Challenge accepted.

BREAKING DOWN COMPLEX SYSTEMS INTO SIMPLE PROBLEMS

Image of laptop and UI screenshots of Dashport app

Process

What we did

Deconstructing a complex value chain

We first needed to build a cross-functional team that could handle the evolution of the project, so we took some of Jebsen & Jessen’s experts and introduced them to our digitization specialists. We then held workshops to help define "the perfect digital trading experience". Once we got a clear picture of where the problems were and what customers expected from trading providers, we focused on prioritizing issues by defining a clear opportunity backlog.

Validation & launch

We used a rapid prototyping method to quickly get user feedback so that we could continue building a MVP that users would love from the get go. This helped us identify the core features that would form the base of the MVP, allowing us to easily integrate Dashport into Jebsen & Jessen’s existing infrastructure. This tactic made the handover process very smooth, and let our teams focus on what came next, active growth. During this journey, we also discovered that Dashport could also serve competitors, and so our team was looking at ways to turn this internal innovation into a new revenue stream.

Building an all-new digital infrastructure

After conducting just two 1-week design sprints, we managed to secure buy-in from key stakeholders and had found our starting point - Dashport, an order management and shipment tracking system. The solution actually addressed an industry-wide problem - a lack of transparency during document exchange and shipment tracking. Working together with the client team, our developers began combining Jebsen & Jessen’s ERP system with tracking APIs to display real-time information to suppliers, customers and brokers, all in a user-friendly dashboard.

Picture of person looking at a whiteboard and pointing at a graph on the whiteboard

achiEvements

Value delivered

With a very small product team, MVP Factory was able to create a MVP of Dashport in less than 6 months.

This included validating our assumptions and features with over 250 industry experts, including 30 qualitative interviews, and designing the tech solution in a way that could be sold to other companies. The internal go-live was welcomed by the entire Jebsen & Jessen team who was able to quickly learn the new platform, saving precious time with future trades.

Dashport has streamlined communication in each trade, letting customers, internal employees and other relevant parties communicate in a single place, while keeping do dcumentation securely stored just one click away.

Although the rollout of the new platform was paused due to COVID19, Jebsen & Jessen has gained a huge competitive edge for when business goes back to normal.

This project has shown internal stakeholders how easy digitization can be and has inspired new project ideas that MVP Factory is helping to understand and scope.