Work

Trading

Web · Manufacturing or Procurement · June - November 22’ (6 months)

Role - Research, Visual designs

Team - 2 Designers(inclusive of me), 2 PM’s, 15+ Engineer’s, 3 QA’s, 2 Data analysts

Tools used - Figma, MS word

Overview

Zetwerk is an Indian manufacturing & procurement company that connects businesses with suppliers for custom and bulk industrial products. It acts as an online marketplace, managing procurement, shipping, and logistics.

This initiative focusses on designing scalable solutions for the sourcing and commodity trading divison at Zetwerk.

Challenges

During my research into the trading business unit, I identified several challenges affecting the three teams of the trading business unit. However, only two of the challenges were prioritized and addressed as there were significant technical, financial, and resource constraints from the end of the organization to invest and build a full fledged solution at the time. Following are the 2 prioritized challenges.

Proposed solution

Taking both user needs and organizational limitations into account—and advocating for the end-users—I proposed to

• Prioritize improvements that enhance the user experience of the current system until adequate resources become available for a full-scale solution.
• Focus on tackling challenges (apart from developing a new specialized system) that directly improve customer satisfaction and drive revenue.

As a result, the two most critical challenges were converted into actionable initiatives for immediate focus and resolution.

How did i arrive at the solution

At the outset of this initiative, I had limited information about its purpose, the intended users, and their specific needs. Recognizing this, I prioritized a structured research process, starting with discovery to understand the users and their challenges. This was followed by defining these challenges, brainstorming and evaluating potential solutions to identify the most practical and impactful options, and finally designing and testing those solutions to ensure they met user needs effectively.

The design process adhered to an agile methodology, breaking down significant tasks into sets of sub-tasks that are executed through sprints.

Discover

The goal was to thoroughly understand users and products, uncovering key needs and expectations.

• Informal 1-on-1s:

Meetings with the operational excellence team helped clarify the initiative, its users, and purpose.

• Contextual inquiry:

Due to the trading business’s complexity, close observation was done to understand user environments, processes, and behaviors.

• User interviews:

Six interviews with Sales, Procurement, and Supply Operations teams provided insights into their goals, workflows, and differences across user groups and business segments (Ferrous, Non-Ferrous, Petro).

Define

The define phase focused on synthesizing research findings to identify user needs, challenges, and expectations, and to spot opportunities for improvement.

• User personas:

Developed for the six interviewees to clarify their goals, needs, challenges, and expectations.

• Service blueprint:

Created to:

1. Map trading business unit components (users, tools, processes) along the customer journey.
2. Support coordination across the departments.
3. Give stakeholders a clear, holistic view of the trading business unit and its operations.
4. Highlight optimization and improvement opportunities.
5. Bridge collaboration gaps between departments by revealing overlaps and dependencies.

Focus areas

Post the define phase the user challenges were defined and the 2 critical user challenges were prioritized and were converted into actionable initiatives for immediate focus and resolution.

Focus initiative 1

Overview

This initiative aims to shorten billing and invoicing times with channel partners and the supply operations team in the trading business unit, improving on-time customer deliveries. Channel partners are entities that form partnerships with a company to promote, sell, and distribute its products or services, while also aiding the company in mitigating risks.

Ideate

Extensive brainstorming sessions were conducted to explore numerous ideas for the focus initiative, involving active participation from project managers and relevant stakeholders. To visually present these ideas to stakeholders and users, paper sketches were created, which helped gather feedback. Based on this feedback, subsequent iterations were made and ultimately the final versions were finalized.

Current process

• Supplier produces goods and emails the invoice to Zetwerk’s supply operations team.
• Supply operations team forwards the invoice to the channel partner via email.
• Channel partner generates a bill in their system and emails it back to the supply operations team.
• Supply operations team downloads the bill and shares it with the supplier.
• Supplier releases the goods upon receiving the bill.
• Zetwerk processes payment to the supplier after goods are released.
• Customer receives and inspects the goods.
• If satisfied, customer provides sign-off via email.
• Supply operations team generates the customer invoice in the internal system and emails it to the customer.
• Customer makes the payment to Zetwerk.

Explore the trading business process

Problem area explanation

Channel partners took a long time to send bills to Zetwerk’s supply operations team after receiving supplier invoices. This delay caused the supply team and suppliers to wait before releasing goods. As a result, deliveries were often late, leading to customer order cancellations.

Design solution explanation

The proposed solution involved introducing channel partners to Zetwerk's Order Management System (OMS).

• The supply operations team will forward the supplier invoice along with the link to the channel partner platform in OMS.
• The channel partners will log in to their corresponding platform in OMS and create bills by uploading the supplier invoice.
• Once submitted by the channel partners, the bill goes to the Zetwerk platform in OMS for approval by the Customer Service Operations (CSO) team.
• The bill is generated after verification/approval by the CSO team.
• Upon bill generation, a customer invoice is automatically generated for the corresponding bill.
• The generated bill and invoice can be downloaded and shared with the supplier and customer, respectively.

Explore the user flow

How did the solution solve challenges

The introduction of channel partners into the system eliminated the need for the supply operations team to wait for days to receive bills. This drastic reduction in waiting time enabled the supply operations team to promptly send the bill to the supplier, consequently decreasing the time required for goods release. As a result, customer on-time deliveries improved, and the number of order cancellations was reduced.

Visual designs

Test

Upon the completion of the initiative, users were recruited, and usability testing was conducted to achieve the following objectives

• Assessing user satisfaction - The goal was to comprehend the users' interactions with the product and enhance overall satisfaction with the experience.
• Issue identification - The testing aimed to uncover usability issues, including confusing navigation, unclear instructions, or inefficient workflows, with the objective of mitigating user frustrations.
• Gather improvement insights – To collect direct user feedback on potential enhancements for improving the overall usability and experience.

Following the completion of the testing phase, the gathered feedback was carefully analyzed and thoughtfully incorporated into the final design iterations.

Impacts

Upon the completion of product development, the success of the initiative was assessed.

Mix panel results

Before the dev handover, discussions took place with the development and data teams to outline the key observations that needed to be tracked. Subsequent to the development phase and leveraging the mix panel data insights, the following observations were derived.

Business OKR’s

Additionally the metrices were derived from business OKR’s which were then converted to north star and product OKR’s.