KegTracker aims to fill the gap in the market we spotted while developing our Beverage Insights solution. I develop the concept, the name, and the brand. This is the logo and CI we developed for this product.
Asset Management and process optimisation for Craft Breweries
Keg Tracker’s sole aim is to provide you with the right data at the right time to make better decisions for your brewery. This is a product I develop at BIGBrave. My involvement was from naming, branding, website and the complete web app’s design, front-end and backend development, as well as driving KegTracker through the overall product lifecycle.
The Opportunity
At BIGBrave we developed our flagship IoT product “Beverage Insights“, which is solely aimed at collecting data at the point of pouring a draft beer and building the right dashboards and alerts for establishments and breweries.
During this time, we soon discovered that there are no optimised processes upstream either, and the the process of brewing, batching, filling and distributing (and even more importantly, returning) the kegs was an area ripe for digital disruption and we soon conceptualised and started building the first version of KegTracker.
The Solution
The first version of KegTracker did exactly what it needed to, it tracked your kegs in the warehouse, as it’s cleaned, filled, dispatched to and returned from clients. We set this up for two specific breweries in a proof of concept agreement where we could do user research on a continual basis with them as they used the product and we could keep improving the system for them, and all other customers.
There has been invaluable insights, from UI design choices to new features like adding batches (to do recalls), partner codes to allow various partners to collaborate in the brewing process, to creating inspection piles for damaged kegs.
Concept Development & Branding
Product Iterations
An example of one of the iterations I’ve done after user studies was a slight redesign on the colour of the navigation bar. The original (version 1) with a yellow sidebar was what we launched with and was trying to push the brand yellow very hard. After some ethnographic research and seeing users getting lost and confused, I went back to the drawing board, made the navigation bar more subtle and used the yellow to indicate key active sections. This has proven to be accepted by the users and they’re getting less lost in the software.
Before UI updates (Confused Users)
After UI updates (More Visual Clarity)
Progressive Web App
The Keg Tracker PWA is where all the magic happens, it’s a progressive web app build in React, connecting to the new Google offering, Firestore as a NoSQL data persistence layer. I also built in some cloud functions to do data processing in the backend to speed things up on the front-end. I built every single aspect of this product.
Final Dashboard
Login Screen
Receive Kegs from customers / partners
List of Kegs showing age analysis of movements
Reporting with Brands Report Visible
See More https://www.kegtracker.co.za