( Case study · B2B SaaS · Logistics )
EMS — Equipment Management System
For Wallenius Wilhelmsen — designed a logistics platform from scratch to track and coordinate terminal equipment such as lashing gear and rolltrailers across their full lifecycle.
( 01 ) The problem
450
emails per day
Nearly all communication and requests ran through email, with no joint system to replace it.
( 02 ) The objective
$410K–$963K
annual cost savings from needing less equipment to perform the same number of lifts
$5–13M
additional annual earning potential with the existing fleet, where cargo demand exists
$200K–$467K
additional annual savings via optimized use of lashing equipment
( 03 ) The solution
Sketched from scratch with stakeholders, a business analyst, PM, and engineering, EMS replaces a patchwork of disconnected applications and Excel spreadsheets with a single system that ops teams, maintenance staff, and third-party partner companies all work from.
Equipment and lashing requests, maintenance & repair jobs, and cost estimates are raised, tracked, and approved or declined in one place instead of across disconnected tools.
Ops teams see live status on voyages, port stock, and equipment condition instead of manually cross-checking spreadsheets.
External partner companies (e.g. Sven Temmerman) work inside the same system as internal teams, instead of a parallel manual or spreadsheet process.
Voyage Inventory, Equipment Lease, Port Stock, Dwell Time, Lift Statistics, and Maintenance all live in one connected platform.
( 04 ) Background
Before it existed, keeping equipment and vessel data aligned meant switching between multiple disconnected applications, with Excel doing the real work of holding everything together.
As the designer on the project, I worked closely with stakeholders, a business analyst, a PM, and engineers to translate real operational needs into a working product for an existing B2B audience — internal ops and maintenance teams, and the third-party companies they coordinate with day to day.
Equipment requests user flow
Setup — user management flow
Lashing requests & stock transactions
Lashing stock overview
Stock overview
Maintenance & repair
Setup — depot location flow
( 05 ) Research & requirements
Instead, the focus was getting the requirements right: I worked directly with stakeholders and real end users through interviews and requirements-definition sessions, alongside the business analyst and PM, to make sure the system matched how operations teams actually work — not how we assumed they worked.
( 06 ) User journey
( 07 ) Define — who EMS serves
Rather than a single persona, EMS had to serve several distinct roles working from the same data:
Real-time visibility into equipment and stock across ports
Receive, review, and approve or decline maintenance and repair requests and estimates
Track contracts, costs, and approvals in one place
Submit and track equipment and lashing requests without switching between separate systems
( 08 ) Key decisions
01
Actions from third-party integrations and email threads — covering Voyage Inventory, Equipment Lease, Port Stock, Dwell Time, Lift Statistics, and Lashing Inventory — are pulled into one system, so nothing gets missed across scattered tools.
02
Partner companies like Figaro raise and track their own requests directly inside EMS, removing the friction of switching to a separate manual process.
03
Requests across the system — creating bookings, preparing repositioning plans, maintenance and repair, and change requests — are approved or declined directly in EMS, with clear status tracking at each step, replacing manual, spreadsheet-based tracking with a full audit trail.
( 09 ) Process
( 10 ) Information architecture
Working from the requirements gathered with stakeholders and real users, I mapped EMS into its core modules and the flows connecting them:
Each module has its own detailed user flow, mapped in Figma alongside the interface design.
( 11 ) Design
With requirements defined, I moved into wireframes and then high-fidelity design in Figma, prioritizing scannability and fast decision-making over density for its own sake — this is a tool ops staff return to throughout the day, often to make time-sensitive calls on expiring contracts, urgent maintenance requests, and stock shortages.
The platform was designed responsively across web and mobile, so ops teams can review dashboards, approve requests, and track vessels and equipment whether they're at a desk or on the move.
( 12 ) Impact
01
Teams no longer lose time jumping between applications or manually reconciling spreadsheet data.
02
The system was designed to be fully responsive, since many department users — particularly port admins — mostly access the application from mobile devices rather than desktop.
03
Master data (the setup model) can only be added, updated, or deleted by EMS admins, keeping the system's core data consistent and controlled.
04
Centralized data cut down on mistakes that came from manually re-entering or aligning information across separate applications and spreadsheets.
05
Vessel tracking, equipment condition, and maintenance and repair requests — including estimate approval or decline — all handled in one place.
06
Status indicators make it easy for other departments to see at a glance whether a booking or repositioning request is already completed, in process, or pending — improving communication without needing to check in manually.
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