PRENETICS
Automating the Order & Fulfilment Workflow
The Enterprise Portal functionalities and features vary depending on its user base. The intended users are internal staff, key stakeholders, and B2B partners.
Role
Led the designs of new features and improved user experience of the platform by fixing core issues. One of these issues is the Orders & Fulfilments workflow that is handled by the Operations team.
Responsible for discovery & ideation, design, usability interviews, and support through development.
Team
1 Business Analyst
2 Operations Personnel
3 Developers
Platform
Desktop (Web)
Goal
Reduce human error
Increase speed for fulfilling daily orders coming from online and offline sources
Challenges
To fully understand the problem of what the Ops team faces almost on a daily basis, I had to put myself in their shoes. The process consisted of back-to-back meetings with them and working alongside them. There were days I shadowed them and got the chance to do a bit of their work hands-on. This has enabled me to see the process up close and from a good standpoint where I see the bigger picture.
To simply put the problem they face:
There are orders coming from both online and offline sources. Online sources refer to orders done through our marketing website(s). Whereas for offline orders, Business Development and Account Managers collect the order requests from their respective clients manually and enter the numbers on an Excel sheet or Google form.
This is then passed over to Ops team to manually sort the product types, country location and delivery provider. In addition they need to add a barcode and create an airway bill.
The order requests done online are exported directly from the portal in a PDF format. The order requests collected offline are also exported into a PDF form from Excel or Google form. These forms are then submitted accordingly to their respective local and international delivery providers.
Pain points Ops team face frequently:
Amending delivery address
Lacking inventory
Country custom issues
Old Order & Fulfilment Workflow
Process
The best approach was to build a preset mechanism that allows customisation and filtering in order for the Ops team to export the offline order requests for the day in the same format as the order request exported from the portal. On the portal, they can easily manage the pain points. These are highlighted in pink on the user flow map above.
With the preset capability, all orders can now be added on to the portal and can be exported from the same and only location, the Order page.
Added features and changes on the Order page:
Overview status bar where users are able to see the numbers of pending orders, cancelled orders, and exported orders for fulfilment.
Overview status bar that duals as a filtering component. Users are able to filter the list of orders accordingly.
The list of columns are now arranged in a sequence that matches the needs of the main user of this page i.e. Ops team.
A user may edit or cancel a pending order. This is done via a modal pop-up.
Chosen solution by the team: Building a preset feature allows flexibility for the user to export a file according to his/her requirements for the day. It acknowledges the three (3) paying points highlighted in pink in the chart (previous page), which are: amending delivery address, lacking inventory and custom issues.
With the preset feature in motion, all orders can now be added to the portal and can be exported from the same location (Order page).
Added features and changes on this page:
• Overview status bar where users are able to see the numbers of pending orders, cancelled orders, and exported orders for fulfilment.
• Overview status bar that duals as a filtering component. Users are able to filter the list of orders accordingly.
• The list of columns are now arranged in a way that matches the
needs of the main of users of this page i.e. Ops team.
• A user may edit or cancel a pending order. This is done via pop-up.
A preview of the flow for editing a pending order. Key requirement: if user selects a new country of address, the fields reset. This is so that the user avoids missing any field. Greyed out fields are fields that are either fixed or considered as a non-requirement.