( By Munawar Khel / Astreya / Product UI/UX Designer / 2024–26 / 6 min read )
Astreya Enterprise System (AES) Platform
Together, the modules turned Astreya's operation from reactive and spreadsheet-bound into a proactive, data-driven platform.
The result and the decision behind it
( What it did )
Shifted management from reactive to proactive: real-time and forecasted capacity views, live SLA countdowns, and AI-surfaced insights let managers rebalance workloads and act on coverage gaps within the same shift rather than after service impact, with cross-training opportunities projected to lift utilization by roughly 12%.
( The decision behind it )
One platform, one hierarchy, instead of 22 point tools
The fragmentation itself was the core problem. A shared spine was the only way to give operations real-time cross-domain visibility and to let one solved pattern serve many modules, rather than re-solving navigation, hierarchy, and permissions for each tool.
Generated schematic, not a screenshot. Real imagery to follow.
( The account )
Context
AES is the internal enterprise operations platform Astreya uses to run its global managed-services business, coordinating a 1,500+ person technical workforce and 400+ field technicians across 500+ buildings in five regions (NAMER, Bay Area, EMEA, LATAM, APAC). Before AES, the operation ran on a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected legacy tools, with supply, demand, scheduling, inspections, inventory, and performance data all living in separate systems.
The project set out to replace that patchwork with a single web application organized around a persistent left navigation (Applications, Reports, and Back Office). From one interface, operations leaders would forecast and rebalance workforce capacity, dispatch and track field service tasks, schedule technicians against buildings, inspect facilities and flex desks, reconcile IT inventory, audit service quality and compliance, and administer the organizational hierarchy and permissions governing the entire suite.
The scope was end-to-end design of 22 web modules unified under one platform, covering capacity management and AI, field service management, workforce scheduling, facility and desk inspections, IT asset management, quality and compliance auditing, and back-office administration.
The problem
Astreya runs one of the most complex managed-services footprints in the industry: 400+ field technicians and a 1,500+ person workforce servicing 500+ buildings across five regions. Running that operation on spreadsheets, email, and siloed tools produced the same failures across every part of the business.
There was no real-time visibility, so some regions and buildings ran at 112% utilization with overloaded, burnout-prone technicians while others sat idle at 55 to 63%, and 3,000+ daily tickets (700+ unassigned, 600+ pending) had no single pane of glass. Operations were reactive rather than proactive, PTO tracked separately from schedules made leave conflicts and last-minute coverage scrambles routine, and workflows were manual and error-prone with 108,000+ missed flex-desk inspections accumulated. Governance was fragmented, with no central way to control who could access which tool at what level, producing onboarding bottlenecks and over-provisioned permissions.
What I did
I designed all 22 modules as one integrated platform rather than a set of point tools. Every module shares the same navigation, design language, and organizational hierarchy, so data flows across capacity planning, dispatch, scheduling, inspection, inventory, quality, and administration without a user ever leaving the app.
Each module was framed by the specific decision it needs to make possible. Capacity Management (Today, Forecast, Throughput) turns five regional data streams into live and forecasted single-pane views, with an Astral conversational AI layer on top that reads the data and returns ranked recommendations. Field Service Management makes the SLA the organizing principle for both the dispatch dashboard and the technician queue. Team Management makes coverage legible with a staffing-ratio grid and PTO-safe scheduling. The inspection, asset, quality, and back-office modules (AV Inspection, Flex Desk, Building Management, Cycle Count, SLoc, Service Catalog, Audit Tool, QC Tool, and the config hubs) each replace a manual workflow with a status-driven, auditable one.
The common thread is a reusable design foundation: shared navigation, an MUI-based Astreya design system, hierarchical drill-down, filter and preset systems, and config-hub patterns that let each new module reuse solved problems instead of re-solving them.
Outcomes
- Consolidated visibility at scale: fragmented streams across five regions, 500+ buildings, and 1,500+ workers were unified into single-pane dashboards, cutting manual data-gathering from around 30 minutes to seconds and eliminating spreadsheet cross-referencing.
- Reduced errors and strengthened compliance: structured validation, controlled status transitions, PTO-override safeguards, multi-mode barcode scanning, and codified inspection taxonomies produced audit-ready trails across inspections, inventory, and facility records, addressing a backlog of 108,000+ missed flex-desk inspections.
- Enabled faster onboarding and safer governance: centralized, toggle-based RBAC and hierarchy management let non-technical admins provision access and onboard buildings, users, and programs across 124 countries in minutes, removing bottlenecks and closing over-provisioning security gaps.
- Established a scalable, consistent foundation: shared navigation, an MUI-based Astreya design system, and reusable patterns (config hubs, filter and preset systems, prototype-validated flows) give the platform a durable base to add new modules without re-solving the same problems.
What I learned
Designing 22 modules as one product only worked because of shared primitives. The navigation, hierarchy, drill-down, filter and preset systems, and status lifecycles carried consistency that no amount of per-screen polish could have. The investment in a common foundation paid back on every module that followed.
Framing each module by the single problem it removes kept an enormous scope disciplined. Starting from what decision a screen has to make possible, rather than what data it could show, is what kept 22 dense operational tools focused instead of cluttered.
Validating complex administrative flows as interactive prototypes before development was worth the effort. On surfaces like Verticals and Programs, letting stakeholders walk the flow first caught issues early and reduced downstream rework.
The full record / 4 decisions
- My role
- Product UI/UX Designer
- Timeline
- May 2024 – January 2026
- Platform
- Web (Enterprise SaaS, desktop 1440 to 1512px, responsive mobile companion)
- Category
- Enterprise Product Design
- Status
- New design, delivered
Tools Figma, Figma Prototyping, MUI (Material UI)
Team Cross-functional (Product/Design, Engineering, QA, Operations, Product Management; Data Science on the AI and capacity modules). Team Management delivered solo.
Decisions
One platform, one hierarchy, instead of 22 point tools
- What
- Designed all 22 modules under a single navigation, shared design language, and one organizational hierarchy, so data flows across capacity, dispatch, scheduling, inspection, inventory, quality, and administration without leaving the app.
- Alternatives
- Continuing with, or lightly modernizing, the existing set of disconnected tools and spreadsheets, each with its own model and access rules.
- Why
- The fragmentation itself was the core problem. A shared spine was the only way to give operations real-time cross-domain visibility and to let one solved pattern serve many modules, rather than re-solving navigation, hierarchy, and permissions for each tool.
Make the SLA the organizing principle of Field Service Management
- What
- Structured both the manager dispatch dashboard and the technician queue around SLA state, grouping tasks by actionability and near-expiry, with live countdowns and a technician-availability timeline.
- Alternatives
- A conventional task list ordered by creation time or building, with SLA shown as a secondary attribute.
- Why
- Managers were triaging inside strict SLA windows with no view of who was overloaded or which tickets were about to breach. Making the SLA the primary structure lets the right task reach the right technician before the clock runs out instead of reacting to breaches after the fact.
PTO always overrides an uploaded schedule
- What
- Built a hard rule into Team Management scheduling so approved leave always beats a CSV-imported schedule, and absent staff can never appear as coverage.
- Alternatives
- Treating the uploaded schedule as authoritative and flagging conflicts for a manager to resolve manually.
- Why
- Counting people who were actually on leave was a routine, high-cost failure. Encoding leave precedence in the data model removes an entire class of staffing errors rather than relying on humans to catch each one.
Config hubs as a reusable administrative pattern
- What
- Designed the per-app configuration surfaces (AV Inspection, Cycle Count, Flex Desk) and back-office RBAC as a consistent, toggle-based, self-serve pattern rather than bespoke admin for each module.
- Alternatives
- Custom-building configuration and permissions UI separately for every module as it shipped.
- Why
- A repeatable config-hub pattern let non-technical admins onboard buildings, users, and programs and set fine-grained permissions without engineering, closing over-provisioning security gaps and giving future modules a ready-made structure to adopt.
( Tags )
- Product Design
- Information Architecture
- Interaction Design
- Design Systems
- Prototyping
- Enterprise SaaS
- Field Service Management
- Data Visualisation