Enterprise software, especially for technical workflows, is seldom in the spotlight in the design field. When you think of ‘product design’, it probably doesn’t evoke an image of a sea of desks in a home office or a workflow that bridges 14 spreadsheets. Yet it is exactly these contexts that describe the majority of employees’ time, and influence so much of their behaviors, mindsets, and health. In our pursuit of creating joyful, seamless consumer experiences, we’ve also created a distracting escape from the grinding, disjointed software all of us work in on a daily basis. What does it look like when you focus design thinking on solving the nitty, tactical processes that make up so much of our everyday lives? In short, it looks like relief.
During a recent project for one of the largest retailers in the U.S., our team was tasked with transforming a meticulous and untenable set of tools integral to its supply chain management. Without getting too far down into the weeds of supply chains, I can tell you that this particular project concerned the distribution of inventory between distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and stores, but also included items shipped directly to customers. And it involved the carriers who physically move those goods—your FedEx, UPS, and DHLs of the world.
Carriers are great at getting things from point A to point B, but the predictability and efficiency of ordering in bulk (to supply all the retailers’ stores) and then breaking it apart and putting it back together to get inventory to the right stores to be out on the floor at the right time primarily has to come from the retailer. That’s where our team came in, to help translate the carrier’s point-to-point capabilities into a coherent, reliable network.
Infinite layers of complexity
For every node-to-node pathway, they are layers of data that need to be mapped to that pathway. You have to consider questions like:
- When does the carrier operate in that particular area?
- What’s available in terms of shipping methods: next day, priority, express, ground and does that vary by day?
- What’s the average time in transit along that route?
- What are the sizes of the loads that can be shipped?
- When does the load need to be ready for pickup?
You might assume that every carrier has this type of data available in some handy database that their customers can just look up through an API. They do not! Instead, the retailers must enter and actively update this data over time for every pathway in the network. Now if you imagine for a moment what it would take to make sure that all of that data is as accurate as it can be across each of the node-to-node connections and how much the efficiency of the whole network depends on that data, then you have a bit of a sense of what the everyday workload of this particular department actually entails.
This wasn’t a project about creating a new model for the data, or creating a new format for analysis, or mapping a complicated set of relationships—even though during discovery it felt like it was all of those things. The core problem on this project was simply one of control and autonomy. We didn’t need to rethink or rearchitect or reinvent… we just needed to put the employees in the driver’s seat.
Putting more power in the carrier team’s hands
To get to the heart of an employee’s challenges, you need to understand their behavior. And there is no better way to understand behavior than to sit alongside them. One way I think about understanding behavior is paying attention to two things: what gets celebrated and rewarded? And what gets neglected or punished?
Over the course of 3-4 multi-hour sessions, the employees tasked with carrier management gave us a crash course in the work, diving into spreadsheets and showing us their process for making updates in all its gory detail. At the time, it felt like an overwhelming wall of information, but in retrospect I don’t think there’s a better way they could have helped us understand how to help or be more motivated to do so.
One step our team was particularly proud of was pulling the employees directly into sessions with the product and development partners to have them rank each concept based on how much impact it would have on their work and describe why it would be impactful. We were then able to convey that impact in our delivery deck. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on something where I believed as much in the ranking and relative importance of concepts.
Screens that deliver
By giving the carrier team screens that comprehensively cover the data and status of entities in the system, it allows them to more easily understand exactly what the current carrier picture looks like and whether they need to add or update a large section of data, it’s easier for them to complete those changes in chunks and pass work off to each other without requiring careful coordination.
Maybe more importantly, this creates a canvas for them to target and scale updates. By allowing them to select multiple entities, and then allowing them to target exactly which fields they want to download, we also are allowing them to create a custom template for bulk updates on the fly, to suit whatever action they want to take. And by allowing them to control when updates or new carriers will go live, we allow them to work problems at their own pace.
It shouldn’t feel like enterprise software is where designer dreams go to die. There is important impact in our ability to battle the meticulous and untenable. We have failed the contemporary professional experience—as a society, but also specifically as designers. We don’t envy this type of work, so we don’t tell enough of these stories, and as a result, we don’t direct our attention or talent to these problems. So while we talk about all the ways design may shape the times to come, we should also occasionally pay attention to shaping the lives in which we currently live.
