The Challenge

Cut out the guesswork

Since 1925, the Pella Corporation has been an industry leading manufacturer of high quality windows and doors for residential and commercial projects. Pella is known for their craftsmanship, innovative products, and dedicated team members who care deeply about serving their customers. Pella operates 20 manufacturing locations and a large network of 250 showrooms across the United States and Canada. Pella products are also sold at Lowe’s and other large building supply stores.

While Pella’s products remain the epitome of form and function, many of their internal systems, and customer facing applications were built with older technology. Information did not flow seamlessly between Pella, its dealer network, and its B2B customers.

Pella’s dealers and B2B customers needed accurate, quick answers—they needed a digital experience that would complement the industry-best products that Pella customers have enjoyed for the last 100 years.

When will I get my windows?

Contractors and builders did not have an easy way to get up-to-date information about the status of their orders or service requests. If they wanted to know when their order was coming, they would pick up the phone, or send an email to their sales rep. Sales reps spent significant time chasing down answers to these questions. Reps could look up some information, but they often had to call someone else. The support teams on the receiving end of these calls had multiple places to look up information. Over the years business processes had evolved and new tools were added along the way, leading to a fragmented experience that wasn’t as fast as it could be.

The Work

Here’s how we helped Pella

When we began our engagement with Pella there was a development team waiting to get started immediately, so we hit the ground running. The team’s first priority was to give customers easy access to the status of their orders via a brand new mobile app. We quickly designed the app framework so that the teams could get started building foundational pieces. It didn’t take long before we uncovered many technical limitations and gaps in the data that was available to us.

We began going on ride-a-longs with contractors, visiting with sales reps, and spending time in the call center. We learned as much as we could about the work they do and the challenges that everyone faced. We also dug into understanding how the current systems worked. Armed with this knowledge we started creating design concepts and put those ideas in front of stakeholders and customers. We learned what was needed and the next challenge was figuring out how to iteratively move towards that vision given the technical challenges we faced.

The desire to improve the customer’s experience started driving a much bigger digital transformation across the company.

The development teams began significant efforts to modernize the back-end systems and create APIs that would feed into multiple systems across the company. We continued to work alongside them, problem solving ways to translate the data coming out of the manufacturing systems into information that was meaningful to end customers.

During our engagement we launched the PellaPro mobile app on iOS and Android, as well as a complimentary desktop web application.

Key UX activities:

“Working with Visual Logic has always been a pleasure, not only do they see past the noise to deliver real value, but also they become valued parts of the team.

Where other companies can feel like they’re supplying people to ‘fill the spot’ Visual Logic supplies partners that advocate for user needs and create beautiful well thought out experiences that both dev teams and users can consume.”

Jay Fruechte Senior Product Owner

Clear, actionable information at a glance

The dashboard helps contractors quickly understand what needs their attention.

Easy access to up-to-date delivery estimates

Contractors can view the status of all their Pella orders, any time, anywhere.

“This is a million times faster than the old way and this is effortless.”

Outside Sales Representative