Rethinking the strategy and the Business Model
Client: Interporto Bologna Employer: Almacube
Challenge
Interporto Bologna is a logistics hub for road transport trade. Its business model is mostly based on selling land to companies to build warehouses to store the goods transported by trucks. However, the land available for sale is running out, and the region's infrastructure plans will shift significant freight volumes from road transport to the rail line. Interporto Bologna seeks to identify new sources of revenue by offering new services to its tenants.
How can we rethink the strategic, operational, and business model of services to add value to the Interporto spaces by meeting the needs of tenants?
The Team
Internal company team members: Facility Manager, Financial and Administration Manager, Customer Care Operator.
Almacube team members: Service Designer, Product Designer, Management Engineer, Economics and Innovation Management.
My role: SeniorUX researcher, and service designer. I supervised the activities of the Almacube team and managed the relationship with the clients by involving the internal company members in co-design sessions.
Interporto Bologna is one of the most important logistic platforms in Europe. It is positioned in a strategic location and consists of 4 million square meters, of which 665 thousand are occupied by railway and intermodal facilities and 600 thousand by warehouses.
Project Set-up
During the set-up, I had a few meetings with the client to define the #challenge they wanted to tackle and the #project timeline. Based on that, we identified the #company team members to involve and I took care of their onboarding.
The structure of the project required 1 weekly meeting with the company team to benefit from their vertical knowledge about Interporto, validate our research insights with them, and involve them in the design of new solutions and their tests. Furthermore, we planned three milestones to present the project outcomes to the direction of Interporto.
Project Phases
Research: User research, Benchmark, Interporto Business and Operation analysis.
Ideation-phase: Ideation and test of low-fidelity service prototypes, the definition of a strategic vision.
Delivery-phase: Product requirement definition, definition and test of two service proposal, and presentation to the Company Board.
Solution
One of the main insights derived from the research phase was that Interporto had an unexploited potential derived from the presence of many different companies in the same area, however, these companies had no interactions between them. During the project, the company team and the Almacube team collaborated to develop two service proposals whose common ground was to create valuable interactions between tenants by making them exchange assets. The Vision is to turn Interporto Bologna into an ecosystem. Interporto will switch from having a "landlord" role to becoming the facilitator of the interactions between its tenants.
Hey there, this is the default text for a new paragraph. Feel free to edit this paragraph by clicking on the yellow edit icon. After you are done just click on the yellow checkmark button on the top right. Have Fun!