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View Case Study Unleashing the Power of AI Process Optimization for Start-Up Success
Imagine a world where road maintenance is smarter, and budgets go further. Avenew seeks to empower city engineers with innovative software, implementing AI process optimization for road treatment plans.
We embarked on a journey to help them make this vision a reality. Tapping into our AI expertise and decades of experience with product strategy, we created a groundbreaking AI-enabled application.
Opportunity
In municipalities across Indiana, city engineers and local leaders are tasked with crafting road treatment plans within timeline and budget constraints. Adding to the complexity, most planning work is done by hand, taking hours of human time to prepare each report.
Essentially, city leaders compile data from multiple sources on weather conditions, traffic volume, driver reports of significant degradation, PASER scores, and more to build these plans. Even after the hours spent compiling the data, they still need to come up with a plan. The experts spend additional time analyzing and crafting strategies to deliver efficient road treatment schedules. Still, it’s challenging to ensure the most efficient allocation of money.
About Avenew
Avenew had a revolutionary goal to change the future of road maintenance planning as we know it. They envisioned an AI-enabled tool that would crunch the numbers automatically to generate optimal plans for scheduling, budgeting, and tracking road segments and treatments. Leaders could get straight to the planning work. Moreover, they’d be using highly accurate, data-driven reports to devise maintenance plans strategically.
To bring this groundbreaking vision to life, Avenew needed an experienced, holistic partner like SEP. Our teams were equipped to provide them with that strategic guidance. Exploring the technical and market feasibility of an AI process optimization solution would help us address user needs and support business goals.
Through the optimization work SEP did, we were able to elevate an entire community’s road rating without increasing their budget. That’s pretty amazing. We saw the proof of concept come to life in this example, and that’s when we all started to realize that we have something here. The partnership with SEP just continues to grow as a result.
—Joe McGuinness, CEO of Avenew
Solution
As their strategic software partner, we guided the Avenew team in devising a phase-one solution approach. We also charted a clear path forward for their infrastructure planning software product. We knew exploring the feasibility of both the market fit and AI-enablement capabilities were the first priorities for building new software that could do what they envisioned.
Using what we learned in product discovery, we built an AI optimizer application. It significantly reduced the time city officials spent on the manual work of generating plans, concurrently maximizing the accuracy and efficiency of road network maintenance using asphalt degradation data.
Leading with Product Strategy
We conducted a five-day Discovery workshop to uncover strategic assumptions, model value creation, define customer needs, generate screen concepts, and explore the potential of AI process optimization. This approach proved invaluable to Avenew. It minimized their risk and investment in a proof-of-concept prototype to take to market.
Our first step in addressing this challenge was determining the feasibility of building software capable of tackling this complex problem. We needed to develop a system to suggest road maintenance plans that optimize a combination of budgets, projected road improvements, and the number of roads touched. We developed and tuned an AI optimizer with automated optimization, data science, and machine learning that evaluates many potential ways to maintain roads.
User-centric and Iterative Design
We conducted extensive user research to validate the market fit, focusing on understanding the needs and expectations of Avenew’s target audience.
Our team met with key stakeholders, including mayors and city engineers from different cities and counties across the state. Our designers created mockups of the desktop app to efficiently gather valuable insights, understand the user experience, and refine the application design.
By better understanding the mental model of the target buyers, our team was able to streamline the user interface and product development plan to accommodate existing workflows more easily, leading to higher adoption rates and an easier learning curve.
Developing a Tech-Enabled Service
Avenew ultimately intends to create a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. However, our discovery findings steered them first to test market fit with a tech-enabled service: an AI-enabled desktop application. Our work allowed our client to confirm the technology’s viability and test market fit with a smaller initial investment.
The solution uses pruning and heuristic techniques to find optimal answers using compiled road degradation data. The resulting AI-enabled optimizer recommends road maintenance plans. It analyzes these massive amounts of data, evaluates numerous potential maintenance strategies, and then presents them to the user through an intuitive user interface—all within seconds.
The system suggests road maintenance plans based on the data. It provided plans that optimize a combination of budgets, projected road improvements, and the number of roads touched. The tool evaluates many potential ways to maintain roads and a UI that presents those options to the user so they can select a plan within seconds.
Using Prototyping Strategically
Concurrently, we developed a prototype for their other strategic option—a SaaS delivery model for optimized plan generation. The minimalist React single-page application served as a demonstrable Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The prototype showed users could invoke the optimizer and effortlessly download their optimized maintenance plans.
Results
Phase one of the app blends data science, ML, and algorithmic prowess, equipping city leaders with effortlessly generated 5-year maintenance plans. We brought Avenew’s vision of AI process optimization to life. The tool optimized road treatment strategies, accurately tracked key performance indicators, and fine-tuned budget considerations—within seconds. These comprehensive reports allow city leaders to get started more quickly. Allowing experts to work on analysis and strategy to devise a treatment plan saves countless hours.
The Avenew team found our engagement immensely valuable and has continued to work with us on subsequent phases of their project.
This project represents a significant leap forward in infrastructure planning for municipalities and counties. The visionary application sets a new standard for efficiency and effectiveness in the industry.
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