OnBatch: batch process ERP for beverage producers
Product design for OnBatch, a batch process manufacturing ERP used by distilleries, designed as a new version of a product already in use and followed by design support for new functionality.
Table of Contents
Summarize with:
Key facts
- Client: OnBatch, a US company with a B2B SaaS product for food and beverage manufacturing.
- Markets: North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
- Work started in 2018 with a new version of the existing product.
- Scope: product architecture, UI and UX, interactions and a design system.
- OnBatch now operates as Beverage360.
Context
The product had been in use for several years when the owner looked for a design team in 2018 to design a new version. The new version had to win new clients and make the move as easy as possible for existing ones.
Scope
- Inventory and equipment management: a master list of every product and material with on-hand quantity, location, unit of measure and total cost, and a guided stock count by item category and warehouse location, per lot and container
- Manufacturing: batches defined before production with material recipes, process steps logged in context with timed readings and vessel volume, a live view of active vessels by production stage, and a Gantt timeline of batches
- Warehouse: flexible filtering and a warehouse map builder that mirrors the real warehouse by floor and nested region
- A customisable dashboard for owners and managers
- Reporting, including a monthly operational tax report filled automatically from production data
- Notifications with configurable channels and schedules, and a global search across modules
Project context
Constraints
- The product was designed for distilleries first and had to adapt to beer and wine, food and beverages, cannabis and chemicals.
- Manufacturing software has to be powerful and precise, and the new version had to stay accessible.
- Existing clients had to move to the new version with as little disruption as possible.
What changed
- Existing users of the old version began waiting for the new version after seeing the design prototype.
- Shown at trade shows, the new version drew attention from new customers.
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