Modernizing SCM Through Visualization
How to quickly assess under commitments that would let the user to identify and act quickly.
Introduction
In 2017 I had the opportunity to lead a team of 2 designers in Mexico and 1 in India and design a complex project for an enterprise cloud application, the goal was to improve the user experience of the existing SCM desktop cloud app.
This project is about how to improve the experience of an enterprise collaboration planner who wants to know where the risks are in a supply chain. For example, which suppliers are not providing commits in a timely manner, which suppliers are under committing, or which forecast values have changed since the previous planning cycle.
This is the way how the collaboration planner monitors the supply chain collaboration in the legacy application.
Context
Most of the applications in the enterprise suite works with many data, variables, properties, users, functionalities, etc. It’s a complex space where the analysis, planning, and requirements assessment. The first step on this was to strip down this complexity.
This project started after winning one of the multiple hackathons we did at that time, my team and I won this project and that let us continue working on this.
This is the initial concept I proposed for visualizing the supply chain risks.
Some initial sketches that helped me explore ideas and concepts.
I found that a Sankey diagram would fit perfectly for attending the problem.
Discovering further details
This is how I started to figure out all the entanglements that could let me understand really well the business needs and goals.
I started to map out the scenarios and start planning the main layout and nav always validating this with PMs and Dev.
Collaboration Planners need to determine and resolve issues with suppliers that are under committing in the Supply Chain, usually they have to collect the information needed by browsing through long tables, making this task slow and tedious.
First iteration, there was still room to simplify, it still felt that there was too much informational and the general look was of a dashboard.
Modernizing the experience
After one more iteration, doing some testing with users internally we started to figure out that we could base our design on the whole Sankey diagram.
The Sankey diagram shows the relationships and status of Suppliers, Manufacturers, and Organizations. This gives the user a quick view to identifying shortages and under commitment.
This was the first concept aligned to the CRM layout showed above. Soon we found the limitations of this layout while trying to integrate more use cases to this approach.
After identifying relationships where there’s shortage the user can drill down to each of the nodes and display all the items at risk in any given relationship and take action.
This project at the end gave us credibility to the new leadership.
The first proof of concept was based on the main flow of Supply Chain collaboration.
Learnings
Be bold, always connecting business needs, user needs, technical constraints and creativity
I learned how to work with designers at different time zones
Optimization of our workflow through keeping a single source for 4 designers.