Supplier network.png

 Supplier network: early concept definition

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is a Microsoft tool for manufacturers and suppliers to streamline the manufacturing process, reduce risks, and optimize profits. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became obvious that a reliable supply chain is an essential part of our lives. Some of the consumer products disappeared from the shelves in the stores (e.g., in the US, it was toilet paper and sanitizers), and product manufacturers could not keep up with the increased demand. Part of this was because of the lack of data visibility between manufacturers and suppliers. There was a business opportunity to solve this problem.

Overview

In order to have more visibility in the supply chain, companies need a way to share their data securely and simply. In a very short timeline (about 3 months) our team had to come up with the MVP for data sharing capabilities, create a data model (for data consistency), validate experience, and build it.

Key areas we needed to explore:

  • Are there any working examples of sharing data between companies that we can leverage?

  • What would be the different offerings for paid and free accounts?

  • Would the companies be comfortable sharing data with their partners?

  • How the data can be shared and how much control the customers will have?

Business goal

Create capabilities for manufacturers and suppliers to share data with each other to get insights about their supply chain.

Role and duration

Lead UX designer. I was involved from the very beginning of the concept exploration until shipment and bug bashes. I partnered with the backend dev lead, researcher, PMs, and engineering team to align the vision and feasibility.

December 2020 - February 2021

 

Requirements

The concept of sharing data is not new in the digital world. I looked into examples of professional and social networks and tried to leverage existing patterns. In our case, we also had a notion of paid and free customers, and we wanted to make sure that free customers get enough value to join the application, and paid customers to get more capabilities from it.

I started the work by listing down the set of requirements and questions:

  • What would be the difference between paid and free accounts in the context of data sharing?

  • What kind of experience will companies of different sizes get: from huge enterprises to mom-and-pop stores?

  • Will the data sharing be bound by the product the company manufactures or any other way?

  • What data do companies share and what kind of insights they want to gain?

 

Concept explorations

For paid accounts, we wanted to create a concept of a network that would provide data not only about direct suppliers but also about sub-suppliers. Free accounts could only connect with their direct suppliers. But could these two concepts live together for one account?

For each of the concepts, I explored the experiences for paid and free accounts. Here’re a few examples.



Exploration #1: can network and direct connections live together?

Concept 1.png
 

Exploration #2: one network per manufacturer

Concept 2.png
 

Exploration #3: multiple supplier networks in the context of the end product

Concept 3.png
 

Exploration #4: multiple networks per manufacturer

Concept 4.png
 

Research

Before we landed with the final designs, we wanted to get feedback from the users. The findings helped us iterate and finalize the designs for the first release.

Key findings were:

  • Companies already share data with each other using Excel and emails.

  • They liked the idea of creating a supplier network.

  • They wanted their suppliers to join the network even if the supplier did not provide all the requested data.

  • They wanted to know what kind of data they requesting and wanted to make sure that the supplier understands it too.

  • Not all partners are equal, some supply critical parts, and some just nuts and bolts.

 

Impact

These concept explorations enabled the team to move forward with the product release within a tight timeline, a turbulent period of uncertainty, and changes in product ownership. Eventually, we landed with the one network per manufacturer (exploration #2) for the first release. We did so because it will allow us to provide scalable capabilities for multiple networks (exploration #4) in the future, that we cannot build now.

After the conceptual and research phases, I worked on the end-to-end flows and continued close collaboration with the engineering teams to define the details and align with the data model.