Dashboard: Inventory management
Group Dynamite manages a $53M inventory across North America.
Team: Sr. Product designer, Product Manager, 2 Developers & 1 ML Researcher | Duration: 8 Months
Problem
Procurement managers faced challenges in predicting accurate new product demand and obtaining relevant data points for daily activities.
Procurement managers deal with 20,000 items across 7 departments and various subclasses for 200k orders per month. Currently, they use external tools to gather data from different sources to place manufacturing orders based on demand forecasts. The business aimed to consolidate all the data points that help predict item demand and optimize storage facilities.
Design Challenge
How might we prioritize and consolidate diverse data points to enable managers to analyze and make decisions faster and more accurately?
We need to create a user-friendly dashboard that consolidates demand forecasting to make inventory management smoother.
Outcomes
2X
Twofold faster in decision-making
20%
Increase in decisions accuracy
1.1M
Annually save on revenue, storage, and management costs
Research: How did we actually get there?
Current Procurement and Forecasting Process
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Procurement managers aggregate sales data from various sources, analyzing and computing forecasted item sales.
What metrics do procurement managers use?
12 Interviews & Workshop
Collected Metrics
Managers compare forecasted and actual sales, assessing item-level units sold. They also analyze overall order requests, total orders, profit, and discounts to understand the final revenue.
What challenges do procurement managers encounter?
Predictability and Customization Constraints in Current Tools
Using data from both physical stores and online purchases through different tools, while also accounting for varying consumption patterns, leads to complex challenges and predictive constraints when trying to foresee item demand.
Lack of Monitoring of New Products
Monitoring newly launched items and different color variations across diverse parameters, while combining the data, presents significant challenges and elevates the level of complexity.
Unavailability of Daily Activity Data Points
Managers and stakeholders utilize a range of data metrics for various activities and decisions, which are unavailable.
Proposed Direction
The dashboard with a consolidated view of current and forecasted data, along with an order management page.
Adding a "New CC" ( new color class) page to track the daily progress of newly added products at the product level
Pros - Consolidated data at the item level to reduce cognitive load and increase decision-making efficiency
Solution: How did we solve it?
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Designed wireframes based on initial research with managers, focusing on their key KPIs and metrics. Collaborated with them during the design phase to validate the priority of each KPI, ensuring alignment with their decision-making processes. Differentiated between a holistic dashboard used by higher management and a detailed level interface for department managers, which further refined our designs. Throughout this project, I worked closely with a project manager who had extensive product knowledge and enjoyed discovering new user insights with us.
User Testing
A/B tested horizontal and vertical cards for product-level item cards
Design two options: one with a horizontal card design that allows managers to scan 12 items on the dashboard quickly, and the other with a vertical card design featuring larger images for a detailed view of item colors and other aspects, but limiting scanning to only 8 items. We conducted A/B testing and observed a notably higher outcome in favor of option 2 (vertical card).
Option 1
Option 2
Conducted Usefulness and Usability Testing
To verify the usability and effectiveness of the metrics, I conducted a usability test with 2 options
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Participants: E-com managers and Executives
Age: 28-50 yr
Overall flexibility
Dashboard homepage
Provide with brand-level predictability data and monitoring by consolidating data from e-commerce inventory and physical stores. Enhances brand-wise transparency and efficiency for accurate decision-making
Structured orders, sales, and discounts for streamlined manager oversight and brand-level metric comparisons
Metrics added to convey brand performance to C-level executives.
Displaying these categories aims to offer a concise overview within a set of 45
Order management
The order management page enhances transparency in department-wide order tracking, contributing to effective inventory control. It also improves the tracking of individual items at the subclass level according to their purchase orders (POs).
We proposed a dedicated order management page to consolidate all product orders, segregating item-level details for improved organization.
Product-level visibility
New CC page (New product)
The new CC page provides real-time data to procurement managers, enabling them to take more precise actions based on unified data, such as actual and forecasted costs and unit sales
Implemented new class color page navigation to streamline filtering and locate specific unit data for each item.
Each card displays product details, description, and significant sales values, aiding managers in daily tracking.
Consolidated all the item metrics on the item card for manager-to-person daily activities
Learnings: What did we learn?
Design solutions align with business and customer needs
One of our most significant challenges was effectively coordinating with a diverse team to meet business requirements and deliver value to users within strict timelines. This experience reinforced the vital importance of teamwork, communication, and thorough consideration of all design scenarios.
Importance to details
Working in a team environment enabled me to learn team dynamics to produce the desired outcome deeply. In addition, I understood that listening is a fine art that provides various insights, for instance, how users' behavior and emotion are influenced by limited features, extra features, and time.
Impact: Collaboration and outcome
In collaboration with Product Management and developers, we aligned designs with technical limitations and addressed edge cases, enabling ongoing impact measurement and seamless design collaboration with the development team.
2X
Twofold Increase in Decision-Making
20%
Increase in decisions accuracy
Achieving a 100% adoption rate among managers, we are currently progressing to the next phase of refinement and integrating new features.
