Who does it sound familiar to? Clothes are piling up at home and there is hardly any space left in the closet. In a moment of free time, overcome with a thirst for action, we finally decided to clear out old clothes. The question remains: where to put it? Nobody in my circle of friends is interested in picking it up and the nearest collection container is too far away.

With the TextilTiger, Remondis Digital Services has designed an innovative service to extend the life cycle of clothing and thus close the textile cycle. In the spirit of sustainability and usability, the Altkeider are picked up directly from the customer's home on cargo bikes. In order to coordinate incoming orders and manage the fleet of drivers, the TextilTiger team needed a modern software solution.

In addition to the end customers mentioned above, there are two user groups at TextilTiger who have to work with software support so that the user experience is good. On the one hand there is the admin or dispatcher. He sits at the monitor and needs a lot of information and data. He needs a good overview in order to plan the optimal delivery routes. So he manages both routes and riders. On the other hand, selected information must of course also be passed on to the drivers of the cargo bikes. They collect the clothing from the customer and are out on the streets of Hamburg no matter what the weather. So you should be able to get the necessary information quickly with as few clicks as possible, even in Hamburg weather and with gloves.
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In principle, both user groups need similar information, just prepared differently. This case therefore requires an application with different interfaces. We have developed a code-based solution that provides the necessary information optimally displayed to both the dispatcher on the monitor and the driver on the cell phone.

The project was new, our approach was proven: We started the collaboration with a concept sprint. In the past, given the different user groups, a web application and a native app would certainly have been used - the latter possibly having a separate app for Android and Apple. So you would have needed 2-3 code bases.

For us at SIDESTREAM, however, this does not correspond to the basic principle of pragmatic solutions. We have built a perfectly functioning web app that also works optimally on the drivers' cell phones. Thanks to very good requirements engineering, we understood exactly which user group needs which function and when. Only these will then be displayed. This enables extremely intuitive and quick use. Because every second counts here. This enabled us to implement tour planning and a rider app.

This automation saves Remondis a lot of manual work and thus time in dispatching. This is also the basis for scaling the service. The most important questions in driver coordination include:

• What should be picked up where and when?
• What capacities are available?

The result or the answer to these questions is clearly displayed as a route on a map.

We delivered the first MVP based on prioritizations that emerged from the concept sprint. Further collaboration took place in two-week sprints with smaller concept sprints in between.

In this project we took advantage of the strong progress of web technologies. We implemented the entire product for all users with just one code base. The advantages: The application is faster, cheaper and easier to develop and operate.

The fullstack Typescript application uses the route optimization API of a German provider, which is used to calculate the best route. The wheel should not be reinvented here, but specialists should be relied upon.

The application runs in the Kubernetes cluster in Remondis' MS Azure development.