NextGen Upfitters customizes vehicles for enterprise fleet customers. The upfitting process, quoting, configuration, building, and delivery were largely manual, with status spread across spreadsheets, email, and tribal knowledge.
Customers and internal teams lacked a single source of truth for upfitting jobs. Hand-offs between sales, engineering, and the shop floor caused delays, rework, and visibility gaps that scaled badly as volume grew.
- Replace manual upfitting workflows with a digital system of record
- Give internal teams and customers shared visibility into job status
- Reduce hand-off friction across sales, engineering, and shop floor
- Lay a foundation that future automation can build on
Conducted extensive research into the upfitting workflow across sales, engineering, and shop-floor operations. Mapped end-to-end processes and identified where delays, rework, and status visibility issues were concentrated.
Modeled the platform around an upfitting job as the core entity, with clearly defined stages, owners, and artifacts at each step. Sequenced delivery so the highest-friction hand-offs got digitized first.
- Led product strategy and delivery for the Upfitting Management Platform
- Defined requirements, user flows, and product direction with stakeholders
- Collaborated closely with engineering to ship core functionality
- Drove change management as the team moved off manual processes
Replacing entrenched manual processes without disrupting active jobs the platform had to slot into a live operation and earn trust through reliability, not feature breadth.
Digitized core upfitting workflows, improving operational efficiency and giving NextGen Upfitters a scalable foundation for managing vehicle customization at higher volume.
- Operational platforms win by reducing hand-off friction, not adding features
- A clear core entity (the job) beats a sprawling data model every time
- Earning trust in live operations means shipping reliability before scope