B2B Supply Chain Mapping SaaS in Textile and Fashion: End-to-end Design of a Supplier User Profile Onboarding and Data Management
Globalization has enabled ever-further-reaching supply chains. Traceability for both compliance and brand image has become more important than ever.
Suppliers from raw materials to every level of manufacturing and fabrication are being asked to provide information and specifications as the entry to doing business. There is not one standard form or centralized way to enter this information. A plant or farm manager might get an email from one company, a spreadsheet from another, and a DocuSign from someone else. The requirements they are asked for vary, and they spend a lot of time entering the same data in many different forms and places.
On the company side, a parent company might have several child companies that use the same supplier, but use different identifiers for them, making it hard to consolidate data for reporting and missing out on negotiating power in contracts.
Our goal is to create a single supplier profile for onboarding that can be shared with multiple co to reduce suppliers' time spent on paperwork and speed up brands' time to value when they use our product.
This is a confidential internal enterprise software; no visuals or functionality will be shown.
Sourcemap: Supply Chain Mapping and Traceability
Company and Users Overview
Sourcemap is a B2B Supply Chain Mapping and Traceability SaaS product. It is a multi-persona platform with Parent Companies, Child Companies, and Suppliers, each having their own goals. It is complex and data-heavy, ingesting and mapping data around supplier relationships and credentials. It helps companies comply with traceability regulations, mitigate risk, increase their own visibility into their supply chains, and source responsibly.
Supply chain mapping is a complex domain. Most companies, unless they are completely integrated and own the whole manufacturing process, don't know any of their suppliers and manufacturers past the last level. Getting to the raw material origin is extremely difficult. All companies have different certificates, attributes, and documents they want. There are also the parent companies requirements on their child companies.
Project Context
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Sourcemap acts as a source of truth for companies' supply chains
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Due to our vast network of suppliers, we want to have suppliers able to enter information once and share it out
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Companies want to start mapping their supply chains faster
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Companies will need to be able to request additional information from suppliers
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Parent companies want to roll up certifications and documents from each of their child brands into overall reporting statistics
The Team, My Role, Timeline, Constraints
The Team
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Account Manager
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Customer Side Pod, Product Manager, 5 engineers, and me
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Supplier Side Pod, Product Manager, 4 engineers, and me
My Role
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End-to-end design
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Qualitative user research
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Collaborative scoping of product requirements
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Experience design and Prototyping
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Dev handoff
Timeline
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This project is ongoing
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Y1 Q1 on Discovery, and User Research
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Y1 Q2-4 on Ideation, Scoping, and Design
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Y2 Q1-2 on Development
Constraints
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This project was in partnership with a single customer in the textile industry and needed to be company and industry-agnostic for future users
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Deadlines and deliverables were externally driven
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Company representatives were present during supplier calls, making unbiased responses hard to collect
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Raw material and origin suppliers were not interviewed due to language and remoteness constraints. These are most likely the users who may struggle the most with the learning curve and access to the platform.
We partnered with LVMH to implement a supplier onboarding and profile, saving customers and suppliers time.
Faster time to value for customers
Customers can consolidate their data requests and reporting saving time.
Future customer time to value went from 9 months to out-of-the-box.
Future customers can begin mapping their supply chains when they sign the contract and register for the platform.
Less data entry requests for suppliers
Time spent on data entry for suppliers is decreased by 50% by storing company and contact information.
Suppliers no longer have to enter their basic information over and over.
Suppliers have one centralized place to enter data.
Better Data Validation for Cleaner Data
Child companies might have the same supplier with different names/identifiers.
Geo-location address services and API integration with other business identifiers, such as DUNS now validate supplier information.
This decreases duplicate profiles and proves suppliers information is correct.
UX Research
I organized external qualitative interviews and materials with the parent company, child companies, and suppliers.
I also attended biweekly design and deliverable feedback sessions throughout the project.
7 Supplier Interviews
Goal: Understand suppliers' pain points in responding to information from customers
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Who is responsible for responding to customer requests?
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How are suppliers currently responding to requests?
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How/where do suppliers keep the information they reference for a request?
5 Multi-Company Workshops
Goal: Understand how companies request information and how they would like those requests to be reported on
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What is the cadence of requests to suppliers?
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How do you send requests to a supplier?
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What are the KPIs you are expected to report on?
Bi Weekly Customer Product Feedback
Goal: Recieve customer feedback on mocks and show work completed in previous sprints
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Reach an internal understanding at customer parent company of what our platform does and how it will support them in supplier information collection
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Validate work and processes
Main User Personas
Max Johnson
Director of Sustainability LVMH
"I want maisons and suppliers to give us information in the fastest way possible to understand our supply chains and get the data used to make critical business decisions around sourcing."
Wants to:
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Understand supply chains for key materials
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See overlap in sourcing to negotiate better pricing
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Mitigate risks in supply and bad media
Key Insights
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Currently has data in various disparate forms and systems
Jesse Neimus
Director of Sourcing at Celine
"I want suppliers to give us the information we need for regulatory purposes and to meet our KPIs."
Wants to:
Report KPIs
Manage certifications and audit for regulations
Easily communicate with suppliers
Key Insights
Only one person is responsible for handling all these requests
The requests increase every year due to new regulations
Drew Carlyle
Textile Manufacturer
"I want to send the customer information they've requested as efficiently and soon as possible to continue my business relationship with them."
Wants to:
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Provide customers with the information they need so they can continue their working relationship
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Show proof of certifications and audits
Key Insights
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Asked to report in many different ways and platforms
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Needs to collect information from different departments and holdings to fulfill reports
Analyzing user personas and utilizing previous institutional knowledge, we identified the key building blocks for successful supplier data management.
Company Centralized Reporting
Supplier Onboarding & Profile
Centralized Requests
Building blocks to engage all users.
1. Supplier Onboarding & Profile
A place where suppliers can enter their contact, company, and certification information, and once that is shared with all requests they receive.
2. Centralized Requests
A central place where parent companies and companies can make bulk and single requests of suppliers for information. A central place where suppliers can respond to reports.
3. Company Side Centralized Reporting
A dashboard in the parent company and company flow where reporting is visualized on the different requests.
Product Strategy and Design
We started with scoping and designing the supplier side since this data was feeding the reporting.
I designed with the following goals, considerations, and constraints.
Fast Data Entry
Goal: Easily let suppliers enter and validate company and contact information
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Integration with various industry APIs to provide unique identification and validation of identity
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Use Flatfile and other OCR services to allow as much automated entry as possible
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Geo-location using Google map integration
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Create our data layer that acts as an invisible "source of truth" for all mapping
Easy Notifications
Goal: Create a notification system in the product that also notifies users' emails
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Design a notification center users can easily access to see new requests for data
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Integrate with SendGrid to send out email notifications
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Work with companies on integrating their branding into emails. Suppliers are motivated by seeing who is sending this request.
Supplier Profile
Goal: Create a document and information storage area for suppliers to keep up to date
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Create a customer permissioning area for suppliers
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Customize what information a supplier shares with each customer
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Document upload and file management
On the company side, both parent and child companies wanted to send requests. Parent companies to child companies and to all suppliers. Child companies to suppliers.
I designed with the following goals, considerations, and constraints.
Multi-Persona Requests
Goal: Easily let companies create and send requests
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Use Flatfile and other OCR services to allow users to upload their known suppliers and check against our suppliers in platform
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For MVP allow customers to upload requests for information by spreadsheet and pdf
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Enable customers to bulk send these requests
Easy Notifications
Goal: Utilize notifications for requests and to notify of recieved data
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Design a notification center users can easily access to see new requests for data and when new data has been uploaded
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Integrate with SendGrid to send out email notifications
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Make received requests easy to download
Future: Request Builder
Goal: Integrate with or build a form builder to create a standardized custom request format in platform
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Remove the need for customers to go outside the system
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Create request templates to guide customers in what types of information they need for specific audits or certificates
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Standardize the format suppliers receive requests in
Outcomes
Supplier onboarding, profile, and notification center are live, letting suppliers join faster with cleaner data. We have onboarded 215 suppliers and eliminated 16 duplicates provided by maisons. These suppliers can all be shared with current and future customers. Customer custom requests are in development, and customer reporting is currently getting scoped and designed.
Key Learnings
In B2B SaaS, customers and users are not always the same.
Advocate for the end user, know when to hold your ground and when to prioritize a customer request.
Working across engineering pods, you need to be able to switch context quickly and keep in open communication with leads and PMs.