UX Design & Dev for Hot Runner Systems Manufacturer
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Application Testing Product Design UX/UI Design
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Beta Testing Compatibility Testing Manual Testing
- Confidential
- July 2021 - July 2022
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 4.5
- Cost
- 4.0
- Willing to Refer
- 4.5
"What stood out most about Belka is the combination of a young, dynamic team with a level of professional discipline."
- Automotive
- Treviso, Italy
- 201-500 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
Belka provided UX design and development services for a hot runner systems manufacturer. The team designed and built the frontend of a custom app that serves as a vertical PDM for the client.
Belka's work improved the client's process efficiency and business impact. The team managed the project with a level of structure and discipline, making the project easy to run on the client's side. They were responsive to the client's needs and willing to push back when necessary.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and position.
I am a department manager at Oerlikon HRSflow
Describe what your company does in a single sentence.
INglass S.p.A. designs and manufactures hot runner systems for plastic injection molding, sold under the HRSflow brand, now Oerlikon HRSflow, following the company's acquisition by the Swiss Oerlikon group in 2021. Alongside the hardware, the company provides engineering and consultancy services, working with customers from the earliest stages of mold and part design. The business sits in the industrial machinery sector, more precisely in high-precision polymer flow control equipment, and forms part of Oerlikon's Flow Control Solutions unit within its Polymer Processing Solutions division. Its customers are mainly OEMs and moldmakers in automotive as well as in consumer goods and household appliances, packaging, waste management, construction, and transportation. The company's flagship technology is FLEXflow, a servo-driven valve gate system that controls melt flow into large plastic parts, cutting warpage and improving surface quality.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What specific goals or objectives did you hire Belka to accomplish?
- Provide real-time status across the network to reduce handover errors, shorten lead times, and support faster, better-informed decisions.
- Make complexity usable. Working with Belka through a structured UX design process - research, user journey mapping, iterative prototyping, and validation with real users - simplify the interface so that complex multi-site data flows remain fast and intuitive to operate.
- Drive adoption through experience, not mandate. Ensure the tool is adopted because it is genuinely easier to use than the alternatives, securing data quality at the source.
- A custom application acting as a vertical PDM (Product Data Management) platform for the creation, exchange, and lifecycle management of job orders across all the group's sites.
- Establish a single source of truth for job orders. Consolidate order data in one governed system so that every site works from the same information, eliminating parallel spreadsheets, e-mail chains, and site-local records.
- Govern the order lifecycle through explicit state management. Encode statuses, transitions, ownership, and validation rules directly in the platform, turning informal site-to-site exchange into a traceable, auditable workflow.
- Enable seamless interchange between sites. Allow orders to move across plants worldwide with each site knowing exactly what it has received, what it owes, and what stage every order has reached.
SOLUTION
How did you find Belka?
Referral
Why did you select Belka over others?
- Great culture fit
- Referred to me
- Company values aligned
How many teammates from Belka were assigned to this project?
2-5 Employees
Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.
Belka was engaged to design and build the application front end of Forklift and to lead the project through a structured UX design process. The scope covered the full path from discovery to delivered interface: understanding how job orders actually move between the group's sites, translating that reality into a coherent interaction model, and implementing it as a production front end that sits on top of Forklift's data and state management layer. The engagement was explicitly not a spec-execution exercise. Belka's role included guiding the internal team through the design method itself - framing the right questions, running the research, and validating decisions with the people who use the tool daily - so that the resulting product reflected real operational workflows rather than assumed ones. Deliverables: User research with order handlers, planners, and site-level stakeholders As-is process mapping of job order creation, exchange, and status progression across sites.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
Process efficiency Average order cycle time, end to end, and time spent in each status
Time to hand an order from one site to another
Number of orders sitting in a given state beyond a threshold (aging/stuck orders)
User experience SUS score or equivalent, if UX validation sessions were run
Support tickets or "how do I…" requests per user, trending over time
Onboarding time for a new user to become productive
Business impact Reduction in expediting or late-delivery incidents traceable to order-flow issues
Hours per week recovered from manual coordination, per site
Avoided cost vs. the ERP customisation or off-the-shelf PDM alternative
Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?
Belka managed the engagement with a level of structure and discipline that made the project easy to run on our side.
Milestones were defined clearly from the outset, progress was communicated proactively rather than on request, and delivery dates were consistently met - including during the phases where design and development ran in parallel and dependencies were tightest.
What stood out most was their responsiveness to our needs. Belka treated our internal team as genuine partners in the process rather than as a source of requirements to be collected and closed. When our understanding of a workflow evolved mid-project - which, given the complexity of multi-site order management, happened more than once - they absorbed the change constructively, assessed the impact honestly, and adjusted without friction or defensiveness.
They were equally willing to push back where it mattered. Rather than simply accepting every request, they challenged assumptions when they saw a simpler or more robust path, and explained the reasoning clearly enough that we could make an informed decision.
That combination of flexibility and professional judgement is what kept the product coherent as it grew.
Communication throughout was direct, well-paced, and free of the overhead that often accompanies external development partners.
Meetings had a purpose, decisions were documented, and open points never drifted. The result was a collaboration that felt less like a client - supplier relationship and more like an extension of our own team.
What was your primary form of communication with Belka?
- Virtual Meeting
- Email or Messaging App
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
What stood out most about Belka is the combination of a young, dynamic team with a level of professional discipline you don't always find alongside it. They are genuinely fast - feedback comes back quickly, questions don't sit unanswered, and the pace of the collaboration matched the pace we needed to work at.
But speed on its own would not have been enough. What made the difference was their firmness in assessing what was actually achievable. When we came to them with change requests under tight customer-driven deadlines, they gave us a clear, honest answer on feasibility: yes or no, with the reasoning behind it.
They did not over-promise to please us, and they did not quietly accept work they knew could not be delivered well in the time available.
Are there any areas for improvement or something Belka could have done differently?
Cost of small evolutive work. The pricing model works well for structured project phases, but it becomes less proportionate on smaller change requests. Minor evolutive items - the kind that are quick to specify and quick to implement - can carry a cost that feels high relative to their scope.
Capacity for parallel workstreams. As a compact, senior team, Belka delivers real depth on the work in front of them, but there were moments where running several strands at once stretched availability and we found ourselves sequencing work that we would have preferred to run in parallel.
RATINGS
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Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
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Schedule
4.5On time / deadlines
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Cost
4.0Value / within estimates
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Willing to Refer
4.5NPS
