Project Summary

If you don’t want to read all of this, here’s the gist:

• Operations came to us with the hypothesis that employees were padding their mileage reimbursement reports to the tune of over $2M annually.
• When we dug into it, we found that the data set used to make this hypothesis didn’t account for a couple of edge cases that was causing the gap in projected cost vs. actual.
• We also found out that were were actually shorting employees on reimbursements because of constraints on the mobile app.
• We built a feature that helped protect customer PII, brought more accuracy to reimbursements, and saved managers a ton of time in their efforts to approve reporting.
• All in all, we saved ~$200k worth of employee hours, and did the right thing to make sure we got employees more accurate reimbursements.

Problem

In Q1 of 2020, our Field Operations partners brought us a problem with Expert (employee) mileage tracking. They noticed an issue with employees adding a little more mileage to their expense reports each day, at a rate of +6.7 miles per job over initial forecasting, at $0.56 per mile, 3.2 jobs per day.

Operations hypothesized that Experts were tracking their mileage during lunch breaks, trips to gas stations off-route, and other unsanctioned trips. Our team was asked to develop a feature that would keep employees from over-reporting their mileage.

<aside> 💰 Across a network of 1500 employees, this issue was costing the company $2.08M annually.*

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Another issue was that Coaches (managers) were also manually validating the milage on 20-25 expense reports each week, depending on the market. That takes a lot of time!

*Allegedly…we’ll come back to this.

Users & Audience

Our network of 1500 In-Home Experts were the primary users of the app at the time. These users are exclusively on mobile devices, and spend their days driving all over their service areas — up to 100 miles or more each day.

A key consideration for this group of users was that, because of the size of their service areas and varying cellular plans, many of them would be traveling in areas of little to no cell service throughout the day.

Role & Team