What if your compliance data came back as an annual report you actually wanted to read?

The problem

Technology as a service is hard to package. There are no bottles or boxes to put a label on, and there is not always an interface that lets a customer see into the SQL and API machinery doing the work.

This supply chain data management company was struggling to communicate the benefit of storing all of a client's food safety and compliance data in the software. Users logged in to send and retrieve documents and never touched the newer compliance analytics features. We needed them to see the product as a compliance hub for management and insight — not a transactional send-and-receive tool.

Where the idea came from

People love insight about themselves. People will spend real time filling out a clickbait survey purely to get a small report about themselves at the end. That instinct works in business too, particularly for software companies.

While I was working on this problem, my Spotify Wrapped arrived — the annual report Spotify gives every user in December, telling them slightly strange things about themselves alongside the basic facts. It was immediately obvious that our clients were pouring compliance data into the software all year and had no idea what it could tell them.

The design

We already produced custom reports for buyers as a premium service, but the approach was to generate charts from big data sets and send them over. The client then had to analyze the charts and find the insight themselves — which is work, not a gift.

With Azzule's data set and its scientific and technical compliance knowledge, we could pull the interesting finding out of the data and hand it over directly. Instead of telling a client they had 1,000 lab results last year, tell them their most-tested area was San Juan Bautista and show them the top five regions. Make it visually striking and make it specific.

I built a full mockup of the concept based on what I knew the data could support, and presented it for consideration.

Why it works

Delivered this way, the data becomes something the client can consume, share internally, and reuse in their own reporting. It also does something a chart cannot: it makes them think about their own operation differently, and about what else this data might be able to tell them. That is the moment a filing cabinet becomes a platform.