SPIE's people log their hours against projects and work orders every day. START turns that tangle of time, travel, expenses and leave into one fast, mobile-first flow that finally fits the way they work.
The challenge
SPIE is the largest technical services provider in the Netherlands, with more than 7,000 people in engineering, construction and infrastructure. Every hour they log counts twice: once to invoice the client, and once to pay people correctly. That second part means overtime, on-call duty and dozens of other wage components that vary from person to person.
The work lived in two separate systems, each with its own quirks. Corrections were near impossible, and, remarkably, none of it worked on a phone. Every workaround cost field staff and the back office time they never got back. Years of acquisitions had layered company on company, each with its own terms of employment, so no off-the-shelf tool could ever hold it all together.
So SPIE decided to build the system themselves. Knowing the experience would make or break adoption, they brought us in to design it.
START started, fittingly, with a design sprint. In four days we mapped the problem, explored a spread of directions and folded the strongest ideas into a single prototype we could put in front of real SPIE employees.
The question we most wanted to answer: how do you make it quick and pleasant to book work time, travel time and expenses from a phone? We explored automatically calculating travel time, booking a whole week of expenses in one go and surfacing overtime the moment it's earned.
The tests validated the core. A per-day calendar view worked very well on mobile, people saw entering hours on a phone as a necessity and the travel-time calculation went off without a hitch. Nearly every one of those sprint ideas made it, in some form, into the finished product.
START is built for the web, but its mobile experience is designed on its own terms, because that's where most hours are logged.
What makes START different is how much it knows about you. By connecting to SPIE's terms of employment, it only ever shows the expenses you're actually entitled to, pays out the right wage components and surfaces your schedule and your projects. Details like a travel-cost calculator, or requesting leave and checking your balance in the same place, make the least loved task of the week as painless as it can be.
Designed for speed
Shortcuts
Assign your go-to project in a single tap, instead of searching for it every time.
Recents
When you assign a project, we show the ones you used recently by default. Most SPIE crews stay on the same projects for weeks.
Multi-select expenses
Select several days at once and book a whole week of expenses in one go.
Duplicate a week
Copy an entire week's entries forward whenever the work repeats.
Alongside START we designed a complete design system for SPIE to build in Mendix, set up for the future as a reusable library and shaped around what Mendix, their build platform, can actually do. SPIE's own colors run right through it.
For the START team it meant consistency, speed and precision. It also gave SPIE the raw materials to stand up their other apps quickly, and even inspired individual employees to start building their own.
“UX was the driving force behind the START project, and its successful deployment proved the impact of putting users first. We also established a scalable design system that now serves as a foundation for future applications.”
Koen Rutten
Product Owner, SPIE
The impact
By rebuilding time, travel, expenses and leave into a single mobile-first flow, one that understands each person's terms of employment, START turned a daily chore into something fast and, by SPIE's own measure, well liked.
The numbers come from hard data and a post-launch survey answered by more than 700 people. Processing is faster, errors are down and the investment pays for itself several times over. The design system underneath carries over into everything SPIE builds next.
17%
Faster processing
Time entry and approval move roughly 17% faster than the systems START replaced.
8.5%
Fewer errors
Corrections and mistakes dropped by 8 to 9%, easing the load on staff and the back office alike.
€135K
Annual ROI
The efficiency gains are worth around €135K a year, about 3.4 full-time equivalents.
8.0/10
User rating
In a post-launch survey of 700+ employees, START scored an 8.0, a high mark for time registration.