Reflection – Visualization

Grocery Purchase Software

Challenge – A whole sale dealer of grocery supplies (Perishable and canned foods) hired my  team to develop a software for grocery stores to purchase their daily supplies. They were  getting requests through emails, in excel files, over the phone or through Fax. They wanted to  give a better experience to their customers as well as gain some control on the inbound sales  process.

Selection – To understand customer needs in-depth and confirm our understanding of pain  areas with them, we invited couple of employees from 3 of the grocery stores which purchased  supplies from our customer. Since we had only limited time with these employees and needed  to capture the design criteria quickly, we choose the visualization tools and technique. White  boarding sessions were done which were converted to Straw-Man Diagrams which was easy  and quick to understand.

Application - Employees were not just asked about the supply purchasing process, but also  about their overall typical day. This was re-created into Straw man diagrams and handed to  each of the employees. In Order to empathize with the employees, they were also asked to  note down what were their pain points during inventory management and replenishment  process, against the respective steps in the diagrams.

We referred to techniques referred to in “The Good Kitchen Story” and the “Visualization tool”  videos in “Design Thinking for Innovation” course by University of Virginia

Insight – Having direct discussion with the end users of the software and having them look at  the visualization of their problem statements gave lot of new insights for the inventory solution.

Employees were noting down inventory levels every day in an excel or using pen and paper,  then consolidating it at the end of the week and then sending it to the vendor. This sometimes  led to out of stock situation. Restocking was done during customer hours which was making it  inconvenient for both customers and the store employees. Where to stock which product was  also was a pain point as many employees were part time and were not familiar with store  layout. We also identified that it would be quicker for employees to scan a bar code to add a  product rather than typing it in. These inputs will help us to build a software application which  would not only have ordering feature but also allow the employees to also alleviate some of  their pain points. Also, feedback was given to the whole sale dealer to deliver packages before  Store business hours and how the packaging should be.

Approach- Given the circumstances, the Visualization technique was appropriate choice. It gave  the employees an opportunity to open-up about their pain points by looking at their store lay  out, how they navigate around it and what they do on a typical day. During Idea generation  phase, we plan to choose Learning Launch tool to test our assumptions about the software and  ensure its usefulness.

