Custom Managed Inventory Synthesis

Overview

The process and supply chain management for second tier inventory created communication blind spots, lack of accountability, and vast amounts of waste. Using Palantir as a management platform, we were able to redesign the process to create product ownership, decision tracking, and less waste which has lead to $100M in revenue savings in the program’s first year of deployment.

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Role

Lead UX Designer

Responsibilities

Product Design

Process Strategy

User Research

Design QA

Prototyping

Retrospective

Team

Kelsey Roberts, Project Manager

Erin Tilley, HCD Manager

Katherine Mitchell, Designer

Fernanda Espinoza, Developer

Alfredo Saeb, Developer

Francisco Parga, Palantir Technologies Liason

Technology Used

Adobe XD

Palantir

Mural

The research collected and synthesized for this project as well as the design and program deployed in Palantir is extremely proprietary and reveals company insights that could negatively benefit competitors. For this reason, the project will be discussed at a high level with very little visual references.

Narrative

Inventory that does not meet distributor requirements goes through an entirely seperate and arduous supply chain process to

Challenges & Goals

Challenges

  • Seven different groups of users help to manage diverted inventory, each with their own unique approach to the process.

  • There was no single source of truth that users could reference to know where materials were in the process.

  • Those responsible for the product outcome would often not have final say on where the product ended up at the end of the process, yet still had to answer for it.

  • Lack of visibility created miscommunication and distrust among users.

Goals

  • Create a single source of truth so that at any given time, any user, even those external to the management process could locate where materials were in the supply chain.

  • Allow product managers to have decision permanence over the outcome of a product in the process.

  • Improve company sustainability by reducing company waste.


Research Strategy and Insights: Discover and Define

Discover: Stakeholder Expectations

We worked with stakeholders from the seven different user groups to better understand the current process that materials can take.

Helping our stakeholders navigate a success framework, product field map, and a “hack the challenge” exercise creates a space of possibility while defining boundaries and limitations that impact the research plan and design that is delivered. The business desired an innovative overhaul of how our users find and request our products with an emphasis on our higher margin items to better serve our unattended operators when and where they are.

 Clearly there was a lot of information we wanted to know… so let the user research begin!

Discover: User Research

Once our stakeholder expectations were defined, we began collecting a pool of potential users for interviews and user testing.

An unattended operator is a Tyson Food Service customer that is serviced through a distributor and does not have a Tyson sales representative. These operators are typically small restaurant owners, chefs, or operations managers for relatively small food chains. There simply aren’t enough Tyson sales representatives to reach all of our customers and so our unattended operators depend on a distributor (and the distributor’s catalog selection) to source their ingredients.

What the heck is an unattended operator?

Finding restaurant managers and chefs to interview during the height of Covid-19 proved to be more challenging than we anticipated. We adapted our search and used usertesting.com to virtually interview 12 unattended operators. We defined a scope so the team at usertesting.com could identify the correct users we wanted to interview. This was a new tactic for our team and was extremely useful in helping us connect with 12 users during such a strange time. These interviews gave us direct insight into how they run their business currently, where they find inspiration, and what they look for when purchasing products.

We interviewed members from our sales team since they frequently use the Tyson Food Service site to stay updated on new product offerings and make recommendations to customers. Their ability to navigate the new site impacts their ability to give customers the best service. Our Tyson chefs each had experience as unattended operators from previous employment, but also were able to give us insight into the mind of a chef and how our unattended operators may be iterating and innovating in their business. Our K-12 buyer interview helped us to understand the dynamic of purchasing products in massive quantities for many different people to prepare and that certain customer channels are held to strict health restrictions mandated by the government.

Define: Insights

This is a small peek into the research we collected through user and chef interviews and workshops with stakeholders.

We heard things like:

“The internal Tyson language that is used externally on the site can make it difficult for operators to navigate our products.”

Chris Kline - Tyson Culinary Chef

and this:

“Districts will form large buying groups to have more purchase power.”

Jen Smith - K-12 Buyer

The next step of the research plan was to distill our research into meaningful and actionable insights that help us to see our gaps and where there are opportunities for innovation.

Insights

Insight 1: Unattended operators are willing to purchase higher tier products, but have difficulty finding exactly what they need on the site.

Insight 2: Our unattended operators have low buying power on their own. They want a way to demonstrate a collective need to their distributors.

Insight 3: For our smaller smaller unattended operators, versatility and extending the product for different uses and palates is a primary concern.

Insight 4: For our larger unattended operators, product consistency is key.

Insight 5: TysonFoodService.com is not a destination for unattended operators to find inspiration, it is a tool for finding useful products - a means to an end.

Define: “How Might We”

 The final step in our research practice is to take the insights and transform them into a “how might we” statement to act as our guiding light for the final design.

How might we inspire our unattended operators to extend their menus with higher tier products and give them the power to purchase what they need through our distributors?

Design Approach: Process Strategy, Integration, and Proprietary Design


Iterate: Mapping and Early Wireframes

With the insights and “how might we” question to guide the design iterations, we began mapping out our user and stakeholder needs to see how they may relate and connect to one another.

Outcomes:

At it’s simplest form, Value Up the Operator allows customers to find the Tyson products they need accurately and efficiently by shifting the website away from serving only the internal sales team and brokers to, instead, focus the information and data on what customers care about and how they make decisions. Our partners in the Prepared Foods business segment are working with Salsify to better align product listings to focus on the key attributes we heard the customers actually care about: price, preparation, and weight/storage.

At its core, this was the main goal of this redesign. All of the other features are what I like to refer to as “gravy attributes” or the extra opportunities we discovered in research and innovated towards.

Gravy attributes:

A simple win from the beginning was creating the “Tyson Choice” banner that is used for high margin or high value products that match the search criteria. This is a very clear win for the company as the more high margin or high value products consumers buy, the more money the company makes. But what about the users? At the end of the day, the design seeks to guide users to the product that best fits their need. Without divulging company secrets, if users purchase higher value products, they will see a direct correlation in the product quality.

Besides being able to introduce a new way of using existing technology and data to the enterprise and customers, the barcode scanner allows users to find products when inspiration or a need arise out in the wild, not stuck behind their office computer - at the super market, a food convention, or at a street food stand in Cambodia (true story from one of the chef’s we interviewed!)

What if, not only could we know what types of products grabbed their interest, and leveraging that knowledge to find the perfect Tyson product match to create brand loyalty, but also how they were using those Tyson products in their businesses? This is made possible through the Inspiration portion of the design. With this section, the company can anticipate food trends, educate the sales team and brokers on customer needs, and influence future product innovation.

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