Circular Center Marketplace
(Below) Showing some of the SRM persona screens
Discovery/Research/Findings:
The new system needs to accommodate both personas specific business needs, be scalable and tie into Dynamics 365 for auto generating a PO.
SRM Persona - internal app
Part 1 - Publish inventory:
Pull a specific inventory list from a specific circular center.
Mark inventory for publishing to BuyBack suppliers
Publish inventory to specific BuyBack suppliers with time period restriction
Ability to lock/unlock published inventory per BuyBack supplier
Auto generate email messing to BuyBack suppliers
Part 2 - Review/Modify BuyBack supplier’s bids on assets:
Ability to review, accept, decline or modify BuyBack bidding
Ability to modify bidding for specific BuyBack supplier by price, percent and QTY
Ability to lock bidding for specific BuyBack suppliers
Auto generate email messing to BuyBack suppliers
Once accepted auto generate PO via Dynamics 365
BuyBack persona - external app
Receive message to view new or updated inventory list.
Bid on items in inventory list.
Submit bid to SRM for review
Receive status messaging from SRM
(Below) Showing some of the BuyBack persona screens
Problem
As part of datacenter decommissioning assets are sent to a Circular Center to be sold or re-cycled. The SRM (Senior Resource Manager) is responsible for managing the relationship with BuyBack suppliers (external customers interested in buying assets from the circular center). The manual SRM process is to provide BuyBack suppliers with a list of available inventories to bid on for purchase.
The current process relies on inaccurate inventory lists, shared spreadsheets, and email negotiations. This process is not scalable, efficient, auditable and is error prone.
Solution:
Design a new V1 unified cloud experience, as the source of truth, with traceability for the two personas business needs (SRM, BuyBack supplier). The SRM view would log all BuyBack supplier’s business dealings while the Buyback supplier would only log dealings specific to themselves.
My Process:
As the single UX resource, I started with user research to get a solid understanding of the current process, business needs and desired future state.
Next, I started working on framework using user flows and wireframes to flush out my ideas of what the process flow would look like. I reviewed with users, iterated and adjusted as new business needs (and “nice to haves”) were uncovered.
Deliverables:
Use cases, user flows, wireframes/prototypes and hi-fi mockups
Workflow:
Discovery, user research and business research
Key findings, use cases, requirements and problem statement
User flows, wireframes, prototypes, mockups, design
User testing, feedback, iterations
MVP Results:
The new application provides a cloud-based solution for both personas (internal facing SRM view and an external facing BuyBack customer specific view) with auditability, security, organization, efficient collaboration, reliability and scalability. This solution can easily be hosted on Stratus (SaaS) when the Power Platform option becomes blocking (due to technical limitations). Through my user research I was also able to uncover new helpful features (Post MVP) which will add to the success of this growing sales channel.
Highlights:
New web application for two personas (internal facing SRM view and an external facing BuyBack customer specific view).
Bs would use a common layout with Tab UI to accommodate future desired features.
SRM view would log all published inventory and BuyBack suppliers’ actions.
BuyBack view would only log published inventory specific to each external customer.
Bidding efficiencies for both personas including bulk change options by quantity, percent and dollar.
Following competitive analysis, the final application would be built using Microsoft Power Platform. As opposed to utilizing an internal SaaS platform called Stratus which supports the CSCP (Microsoft Cloud, Supply Chain, and Provisioning) group.
Post MVP - New features:
Persona specific calendar view of upcoming inventory schedules available for pre-bidding, sourcing planning and decommissioning scheduling.
Ability to pre-bid/ (2-way) negotiate on inventory before public publish.
Ability to expose/choose shipping options helping with cost, shipping speed, security and bulk shipping options.
Pre-populate bidding based off market trends, past transactions, or customer history.
Ability to have direct messaging in app between SRM and BuyBack buyer.
SRM dashboard showing metrics/goals/time of the Circular Center Marketplace (Current, Future and Historical) utilizing rich data visualizations. (note: this would piggyback with a different project I’m working on for Cloud Sustainably, Decommissioning and Carbon control within hardware design)
BuyBack supplier dashboard showing metrics of their bids/purchases (Current, Historical and Predictive) utilizing data visualizations.