ONE-KEY™ 2023: A Year in Review

One-Key News

Lucas Marshall

|Published: December 4, 2023|Updated: January 17, 2024

One-Key 2023 Year in Review gif with pulsing bluetooth signals

2023 has been a year of tremendous change and accomplishment for the One-Key team.

Before we head into holidays and wrap on 2023, it’s our ritual to look back on some of the team’s accomplishments this year—our greatest hits and favorite replays, not unlike Spotify’s personalized “Wrapped” playlists (keep reading to the end for our collective team’s playlist)!

What’s Inside

Transfers Refresh
New One-Key Compatible Products with Machine Learning
Most Read Articles of the Year
Articles in Third-Party Publications
New Content Types
Final Treat: One-Key Wrapped Playlist (2023)

Transfers Refresh

Back in May, you may have noticed a change to the Transfers experience.

This change represents a huge team effort. The transfers feature within the One-Key app interacts with much of functionality available to users–e.g., inventory, places, people—so making one small change can create a cascading domino effect. Liz Haagensen, a One-Key digital product manager, discussed in a recent employee story, the challenges as well as great outcomes that came from her leadership, working to deliver this new, enhanced experience.

With these changes, we updated the transfer feature, adding a more robust experience including:

Date Range – You can now take more control over the inventory management, jobsite management, and equipment scheduling process by being able to schedule future transfers, which can help automate the process. What’s more, you can cancel future transfers, should they no longer be needed.
Notes – Similar to the “Notes” section found across the suite of reporting tools available to you in One-Key, you can now add notations to transfers you’re initiating. This means you can dictate instructions to recipients or add context that may come in handy when reflecting back on transfers at a later date (see below).
Transfer History – Transfer history now shows transfer states (e.g., Completed, Upcoming), and a blue overflow icon allows you to view these transfers in context of when they were created, what was included, and any notes were added to help provide a recall at a later date. They can also be canceled if upcoming, while a PDF transfer record can be printed off or emailed for verification purposes. What’s more, robust search capabilities including an embedded search bar and advanced filters (e.g., transfer dates, places, status, assignees, divisions, etc.) empower tool managers to stay on top of the transfer process every step of the way.

New One-Key Compatible Products with Machine Learning

Milwaukee Tool leads the industry with the widest range of connected smart power tools with now 100+ solutions.

Controlled Impact Wrench

In addition to machine learning we’ve added in antikickback solutions, this year, the release of our mid- and compact controlled torque impact wrenches represent the most advanced power tool solutions we’ve delivered to date. Designed with proprietary sensors and machine learning developed algorithms to overcome common jobsite variability, our controlled torque impact wrenches help deliver torque repeatability for utility-scale solar projects.

As our most advanced solution to date, the One-Key team in collaboration with the controlled torque impact wrench product management team built a Guide to help end users set up and train their controlled torque impact wrenches.

Most Read Articles of the Year

Every year, we aim to deliver the most helpful content to readers like you that is designed to help inspire you, help you become more productive in your role, and spark conversations to help drive the industry forward.

Milwaukee One-Key compatible tools are kitted in a PACKOUT sent to the job

The stats are in on the past year, and here are the titles you couldn’t get enough of!

The following articles are the most read articles we wrote this year:

Articles in Third-Party Publications

Last year, the team published around six articles in third-party publications to help expand our reach as thought leaders in the construction technology space.

Gif shows various third-party publications

This year, we prioritized this initiative in a major way, and (at the time of this publication), the team has published 22 articles in leading publications including:

ForConstructionPros
The Lean Construction Blog
Geo Week News
Project Times
Construction Business Owner Magazine
Manufacturing Tomorrow
Robotics Tomorrow

Some of those titles can be seen below:

Third-party publication collage

We’d like to thank these publications and we look forward to continuing building these relationships and creating valuable content for the industry while expanding our audience.

New Content Types

This year, we introduced several new types of content:

Expert Roundup
Interview
Glossary
Success Stories

Expert Roundup

Early this year, we introduced a new series of content, the Expert Roundup, where we look to gather a roundtable of industry experts, ask them to provide their insight on a single topic or trend, and curate their responses while offering a final reading and consensus between these experts.

Expert Roundups

The Expert Roundup represents our commitment to connecting our readers with the very best insights across the industry.

This year, we released two Expert Roundups:

We encourage you to read these roundups to see how our panel of experts did! We look forward to continuing this tradition in future years to come.

Interview

Also, relatively new for this year is the Interview.

There are two styles of interviews we’ve employed:

Topic-Style Interview:

Similar but distinct from the Expert Roundup, for the topic-style interview format, we partner with a single expert related to a specific topic we aim to unpack on a deeper level. In these articles, we’ll provide a deep dive on a topic, underpinning these deep dives with rich subject matter expertise courtesy of our experts’ responses to our guided questions on the discussed topic.

Topic-Style Interview

Examples include:

Transcript-Style Interview:

In addition to the topic-style interview, we also have employed the transcript-style interview, wherein we interview a subject matter expert at the top of their field and ask them a series of questions specific to them as subject matter experts and people.

transcript-style interview

The format typically includes a brief introduction of the person and their background followed by a slightly edited version of the interview transcript.

Examples include:

Outside of transcript-style interviews featuring SMEs, we’ve also employed the concept with our Employee Stories series, a series we first began last year.

Employee Stories from 2023 included:

Glossary

Building and construction segments represent a complex, often multidisciplinary process that is quickly adapting. We rolled out the Glossary to help curate in a central location the vast terminology related to a single segment of the construction process.

Gloassary

These Glossary of Terms also represent living, breathing lists we recommend bookmarking as we add to them as newer terms and practices relative to each list become available.

Current glossaries include:

We recommend bookmarking these glossaries as well as to keep a look out for future glossaries in years to come.

Success Stories

The last content series we launched this year deserved its own announcement:

Four success stories

This summer, we launched a new Success Stories blog, a central resource library where we share the captivating stories of real One-Key end users, wins they’ve celebrated using the platform, and processes they’ve adopted to help you stay inspired and get new ideas of how you might use the app and connected devices and tools to drive greater efficiency onsite.

In addition to the Success Stories blog, we also released a longer-form product storytelling example where we shared some tips on how One-Key and PACKOUT™ Modular Storage go hand-in-hand as well as how two users have connected these systems to drive greater physical and digital organization.

PACKOUT and One-Key user stories

We recommend reading these stories and bookmarking the Success Stories blog as we continue to roll out new, inspiring user storytelling and we also would love to hear and share your own stories. If you’ve found success using the One-Key app, we’d be honored if you’d share a review on App Store or Google Play—we may reach out to you to see if you’d be interested in sharing your experience with our readers!

Final Treat: One-Key Wrapped Playlist (2023)

As is tradition starting from last year, we’ve connected with One-Key team members and compiled a playlist of our collective Spotify Wrapped—an eclectic fusion of many different musical genres the team enjoys! We hope you’ll find some earworms from the team’s playlist:

Bonus Gift: Holiday Presents for the Inventory Manager in Your Life

If you’ve made it to the end of this article, congratulations! As we head into the holidays and prepare for 2024, here are some possible holiday gifts for the tool manager in your life:

One-Key compatible tools – to drive greater productivity onsite through standard Bluetooth tracking; customization (on select models) to deliver application-specific precision, repeatability, and safety via machine learning; utilization data (on select models) that can be synced to the cloud and rolled into customizable reports for quality assurance purposes.
ONE-KEY™ Asset ID Tags - to deliver equipment tagging and inventory kitting around the tool crib and greater performance on jobsites thanks to jobsite-friendly, heavy duty adhesives.
ONE-KEY™ Bluetooth Tracking Tags – to offer greater functionality through Bluetooth tagging that extend the standard Bluetooth tracking functionality of One-Key compatible tools to untracked items (e.g., traditional power tools from other manufacturers, jobsite ladders/carts, etc.).

From all of us here at Milwaukee® on the One-Key team, we wish you a happy holidays with your families and friends!

About the Author

Lucas is Content Marketing and SEO Manager for Milwaukee Tool, where he and his team raise awareness about the company’s digital products and educate users on best practices through a variety of content vehicles. More Content By Lucas Marshall