Supply Chain UX — The power of listening to users
I work as a User Experience Designer at Jumbotail, a company that aims to organise food and grocery ecosystem in India through Data, Design & Technology. (https://www.jumbotail.com). My role as a UX Designer is to simplify the experience of using our internal tools, for our users.
In this post, I want to share my experience of a recent visit to one of our fulfilment centres in Jumbotail. My goal was to understand one particular flow within our supply chain operations — how are product returns handled?
The supply chain in Jumbotail is built completely from ground up, in terms of process & technology. Today we have reached a certain level of maturity, where each leg in the supply chain is relatively streamlined but still a long way ahead to develop further.
Similar to other companies, operations in our warehouses are split based on different processes (forward leg & return leg). The facility that I visited is the one that handles product returns. This can either be due to damaged / faulty products or just that the customer had no requirement for the product. Either way, the supply chain is flexible to directly handle these products by picking it up from each customer and accordingly sorting* it at the facility.
*Sorting, in this case, refers to the process of segregating products based on the product type and extent of damage
What started off as a usual field visit to the fulfillment centres (aka FC) to take a closer look at the operations, quickly turned into a research study. We were in for a surprise as we were about to receive a lot of valuable feedback from the ground team about the existing processes.
The feedback received was truly an eye opener. It was quite insightful to know about the small but significant details of the processes present within the supply, that often don’t reach the design team sitting behind the computer screens. The team on the ground highlighted key aspects of the process that were fractured, directly compromising the efficiency of the operations.
To give you some context — we were studying the flow of how product returns were done, once they are either returned or rejected by a customer.
Instead of saying its a complex process, let me explain the complexity — on an average we receive a certain number of products, in returns, everyday from each of our hubs(final mile delivery centres). A reconciliation is done for each of these products followed by a sorting process and then either it is sent for liquidation (in case of damaged or stale products) or it is put back in the system (products in good condition).
The time taken to handle a single return trip from one hub is pretty time consuming, let alone handling it for 8 other hubs each day.
In this post, I want to highlight how a few key insights that were provided by the team on the ground, increased the efficiency of a task multiple fold.
Some of the challenges they faced -
- Transparency of Information — Each trip of returned goods is accompanied with a physical document with the item description, quantity and condition of the product. The number of items can vary for each delivery and a lot of time is spent in this leg to first verify each item in the vehicle against its respective entry in the document. Obviously it is not in order.
- Organisation of products — Each time the FC receives a shipment of returned goods, there is no logic in the arrangement of crates inside the vehicle. For example — one item of 50 qty could be placed in over 10 crates, spread anywhere across the vehicle. The time taken to organise each product before proceeding to verify and sort out the same had an adverse effect on the productivity.
Solution -
After a lot of brainstorming, the answer was simple — while dispatching products from hubs each product marked for return must be tagged to a uniquely numbered crate instead of filling the crates in random fashion.
By doing so, the receiving & verification process at the warehouse becomes simple, cutting the time for one delivery by less than half. This would also have a direct impact in reducing the usage of crates and simplify the sorting process.
Although it does require a change in the process by the downstream supply team, the output was more valuable, in terms of boosting the productivity of the team and also having complete transparency in the movement of goods.
To sum up, although the final solution seems simple and straightforward, none of us from the design team, sitting at the office, could have noticed this anomaly or understood the reality, without observing the process first hand.
In my next post, I will be going into the design details of how this experience was made simple for the team using our applications.
