Danone are an international nutrition brand delivering the best quality nutrition to promote good health and well-being. Their mission is to bring health through food to as many people as possible. They are the world number 1 in fresh dairy products, world number 2 in early life nutrition, and waters, and European number 1 in medical nutrition.
With such a large organisation comes the near 100,000 of Danone’s staff members across their many offices. Understandably, with such large numbers of staff HR processes need to be as straight-forward and productive as possible.
With this in mind, Danone needed an efficient way to manage staff parking at their Chiswick Park office in London.
Our challenge was to build an effective solution which allowed the allocation of spaces to users based on HR criteria, and for allocated users to make these spaces available to colleagues in the event of absence, external meetings etc.
Approach
We built a simple mobile application with an easy-to-navigate user interface, compatible for iPhone and Android devices. The app, named DanPark, allows booking users to log in and see a Monday to Friday list displaying when spaces are available. These users can then submit a request for available parking spaces through the app. Once their booking has been confirmed, the user receives a car park space identification number, informing them which space to park in when they arrive at the car park.
The app also enables space owners to log in and view the weeks ahead, easily selecting the days they wish to surrender their space.
We built the functionality with the end user in mind every step of the way, ensuring that the app simplified the parking process for them. Our simple user interface allowed for this to happen, making the user journey as seamless as possible.
Despite finishing our solution within a couple of weeks, we learnt a lot – mostly some new car parking terminology that we’d never heard before!
We also took a slightly new direction with DanPark as it was the first purely API app that we had built before. This allowed us to adapt our skills in a new way and we thoroughly enjoyed the chance to take our expertise in a slightly different direction.
As always, we relished the opportunity to focus heavily on user experience and providing a positive experience of using DanPark. We like to think we’ve helped the individual employees with their day-to-day, as well as assisting with the daily running Danone’s larger organisation.
Impact
Within 2 months of the app being used, the Chiswick Park office have seen instant results. They have received 150 requests for spaces, with 57% of spaces being filled.
"The quoted price was competitive, and their professionalism and approach helped them stand out from the other agencies up for consideration.
The team at Mashbo were fantastic from the outset. The team ensured they understood the specification and provided just enough comms throughout the development process to keep us aligned with progress, discuss ideas, or make suggestions.
The app was built to specification: simple and intuitive. It has provided a valuable resource to employees at our new offices. The web interface is simple to use and easily picked up by the admin team.
In the event we encountered a bug or needed support they were quick to respond and work through it together.
A pleasure to work with, I look forward to finding our next collaborative project."
Paul Bromsgrove, Business Solutions Analyst at Danone UK