Maintenance-Reporting Mobile App
86 Repairs
86 Repairs and Atomic launched a handy solution that let restaurant workers report appliance problems without disrupting their flow.
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Picture this: you’re working in a popular restaurant’s kitchen. It’s dinnertime and the orders start rolling in. The counter-mounted printer is spitting out tickets left and right. A 10-top just walked in, celebrating their grandfather’s birthday over a four-course meal. The servers are starting to hustle faster. As they scurry by, the aroma of eight different dishes wafts through the air.
Then you hear a call from a line cook that makes your stomach sink.
“Hey, the fryer pilot won’t light! I think it’s busted!”
In these moments, 86 Repairs comes to the rescue.
Coordinating Stakeholders
86 Repairs Saves the Day
86 Repairs is a repair and maintenance solution designed for restaurant operators. They contract with everyone from mom-and-pop diners to well-known franchises with dozens of restaurants under management, like McDonald's or Wendy’s. Restaurants can use 86 Repairs’ service to contact maintenance professionals in the field or send requests to an in-house technician.
The web-based app they use to communicate with customers has clever functionality. For instance, before setting up new relationships with their customers,
86 Repairs would catalog all the client’s equipment in the app. Then, when a worker submits a ticket, they can choose from a list of equipment already logged in the system.
In an industry where uptime and speed are crucial, 86 Repairs recognized the need to extend their web-based app into a mobile app. With a mobile app, frontline workers could report problems like broken ranges in real-time, rather than interrupting back-office work to ask their manager to file the report on their computer.
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Keeping Up with a Shifting Industry
The coronavirus pandemic forced restaurants to adopt new technology to cater to changing consumer demands: online ordering, touch-free delivery, digital reservation-booking.
Mike Meyers, 86 Repairs’ Lead Product Manager, said technological changes also transformed the back-of-house operations.
“People weren’t allowed to use phones in kitchens back in the day; with the pandemic, that all changed,” he said. “In order to scale and grow, we needed to meet the customers and market where they were in the form factor they needed.”
Meyers’ team built a React Native prototype that translated the web app’s functionality into a portable form factor. Once they bought into the idea of a mobile app, they asked Atomic Object to help them flesh out the product as quickly as possible.
In order to scale and grow, we needed to meet the customers and market where they were in the form factor they needed.
A Partnership at the Speed of Change
86 Repairs’ three-month engagement with Atomic addressed their main opportunity: empower the front-line workers to surface issues as they arose in the kitchen without interrupting their workflow to find a manager or access the web app.
“In kitchen environments, people are in between many tasks at once,” said Meyers. “To complete a task secondarily related to their service, it has to be as quick and easy as possible.”
Working together, Atomic and 86 Repairs sought to build a mobile app that allowed kitchen staff to submit service requests in real time, reducing appliance downtime and enabling swift issue resolution.
Meyers says that as soon as the team came together, he saw his staff and Atomic’s team gel.
“From day one, I felt like I was working with people I’d known longer,” he said. “The amount they invested in understanding the business was great to see. I felt like they were bought into it from the beginning. They came in curious, engaged, and interested, and they asked really good questions.”
Taste-testing the Product in the Field
During kitchen site visits in Chicago, Atomic’s multidisciplinary team began by presenting the prototype to end-users, gathering insights, and identifying pain points. The information collected from these trips informed design choices and ensured the app met the specific needs of the end-users in their work environment.
By speaking with real users, Meyers says the team collected insights that translated into a product roadmap. For example, through this work, they learned why clear, concise communication is important in kitchens.
“In a fast-paced environment, it's easy for important updates to fall through the cracks,” he said. “The right software can make a huge difference in solving this problem - everyone knows where to look for the updates"
This field discovery also led to insights into the new app’s information architecture. They gleaned what data was important to surface at what time, what wording would speak the same language as the users, and how information is typically shared in commercial kitchens.
Atomic Designer Ian Culver says he observed that the average busy kitchen manager needed to look at the app and understand the problem raised right away.
“We tried to figure out what customers expected to see and what order it should be in, and then design around those expectations,” Culver said.
He found that integrating images of equipment would help provide context for the ticket.
Employing their field research, the designer’s improvements focused on presenting data more efficiently, simplifying the user interface for quicker access to crucial information. This enhancement addressed the challenge of managing large amounts of data, making it easier for users to navigate and understand the information—even in bustling kitchen environments.
These insights continued to guide project work after Atomic rolled off the project.
“We validated—and later built—our push notification framework and in-app approval workflows in response to what we learned through the research with the Atomic team,” said Meyers. “This was highly relevant and timely comms are super important to our customers.”
Mike Meyers, Lead Product Manager, 86 Repairs
Serving the Vision
Serving the Vision
After the team collected enough information to build a product backlog, Atomic’s developers completed infrastructure work to prepare the prototype for production. The team also improved the main service request workflow, emphasizing the ease of taking pictures, adding details, and sending them to 86 Repairs' backend. The system was integrated with a backend that cataloged all client equipment, facilitating efficient ticket creation.
86 Repairs' service prioritization system, based on severity levels, determined the speed of response. High-priority issues trigger immediate attention. Building this into the mobile app saves restaurants critical time when operationally vital equipment breaks.
“At best, an equipment malfunction is merely an interruption,” said Meyers. “At worst, it’s a threat to the business.”
The product development process involved close collaboration between Atomic and 86 Repairs, with a tight deadline driving the urgency to deliver a functional mobile app. Atomic leveraged React Native and Expo, a React Native framework, for rapid development.
The use of Expo provided out-of-the-box functionalities, such as over-the-air updates and notifications, speeding up the development process.
Atomic Object developer Jake Silas said the project’s tech stack allowed the development team to work more quickly.
“Expo is like React Native with bumpers,” he said.
Delivering Business Value
The result was a cross-platform React Native iOS and Android mobile app available for download on app stores used by close to 1,000 subscribers today.
86 Repairs was also able to take over technical ownership of the mobile app after Atomic delivered the first iteration. Meyers says the post-launch handoff from Atomic’s team to 86 Repairs was smooth.
“The go-live was almost too easy. No scary moments or surprises,” he said. “From day one, the new app just worked how we hoped it would. At this point, all our developers are contributing code to the app and we’re fully supporting it now.”
At the end of the engagement, Meyers says the mobile app provided a fast and empathetic tool to report and resolve issues.
“We cut the issue-reporting time in half,” he said. “For customers that called, texted or emailed it was five minutes of back and forth; we’d lose their attention, so removing the gaps in the attention let us get all the information we needed up front.”
Meyers notes that the app’s ability to accurately collect information in a single source not only reduces downtime but also enables his company to present a compelling case to potential customers making choices around cost allocation.“The mobile app is the best form-factor for front-line staff to help managers build data trails to inform decisions,” he said.
The go-live was almost too easy. No scary moments or surprises. From day one, the new app just worked how we hoped it would. At this point, all our developers are contributing code to the app and we’re fully supporting it now.
Coordinating Stakeholders
A Partnership with a Storybook Ending
The team’s careful project management, client communication, cutting-edge architecture, and cohesive design strategy helped the team ship the product on time and on budget.
Reflecting back on the multi-year, high-profile project, Robinson said Atomic helped his company arrive at a special moment in time.
“We'd never done anything this big. Ever,” he said. “We’re live across all the major pillars Atomic said they would deliver on. It was delivered on time, on budget, to expectation, live. Not three or four milestones late with people leaving and the platform half-baked and full of bugs.”
StoryLoom began open-beta in December 2022. A global launch is scheduled for the spring of 2023.
“We’ve been given a rare opportunity," said Robinson, "to find success by chasing opportunities Starship Enterprise-style: going where people aren’t—pushing boundaries.”
The Atomic Team
Here are some of our current Atoms who worked on this project. Click their photo to read their bios!
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