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Supplier Profile Onboarding and Management
End-to-end Supply Chain Mapping: Textile Vertical  

TL:DR
The Problem

Suppliers in every level are asked to provide different information and specs to many brands in many disparate forms. 

The Solution

Create a centralized Supplier Profile to share amongst brands and receive requests. 

The Impact

Suppliers reduce brands' data entry time by 80%. Data is validated, removing duplicates. 

My Role

End-to-end Designer and User Researcher

Context: Company, Users, & Project

Company

  • Sourcemap is a B2B Supply Chain Mapping and Traceability SaaS product. 

  • Multi-persona platform with Parent Companies, Child Companies, and Suppliers, each having their own goals

  • Complex and data-heavy, ingesting and mapping data around supplier relationships and credentials

  • Helps companies comply with traceability regulations, mitigate risk, increase their own visibility into their supply chains, and source responsibly.

Users

  • Most companies 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

  • Sourcemap acts as a source of truth for companies' supply chains

  • Due to our vast network of suppliers, we want to have suppliers able to enter information once and share it out 

  • Companies want to start mapping their supply chains faster

  • Companies will need to be able to request additional information from suppliers

  • Parent companies want to roll up certifications and documents from each of their child brands into overall reporting statistics

This is a confidential internal enterprise software; no visuals or functionality will be shown.

Project Scope: Team, Timeline, My Role & Constraints

Team & Timeline

  • Account Manager

  • Customer Side Pod: Product Manager, 5 engineers, and me

  • Supplier Side Pod: Product Manager, 4 engineers, and me

My Role

  • End-to-end design

  • Qualitative user research

  • Collaborative scoping of product requirements

  • Experience design and Prototyping

  • Dev handoff

Constraints

  • This project was in partnership with a single customer in the textile industry and needed to be company and industry-agnostic for future users

  • Deadlines and deliverables were externally driven

  • Company representatives were present during supplier calls, making unbiased responses hard to collect

  • 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.

Impact: Data Entry Decreased, Cleaner Data, Faster Time to Value

Suppliers reduced data entry by 80%

  • Supplier have one centralized place and standard format to enter data

Better Data Validation for Cleaner Data

  • Geo-location address services and API integration with other business identifiers, such as DUNS now validate supplier information.

  • Decreases duplicate profiles and proves suppliers information is correct

Faster Time to Value for Customers

  • New Customers reduce their implementation period from 9 months to out of the box with overlapping suppliers

  • Effects are compounding with each customer added

Discovery: Supplier Needs, Company Needs & Design Feedback

7 Supplier Interviews

Goal: Understand suppliers' pain points in responding to information from customers

Aha! Moment: Suppliers need to reference multiple systems and people to respond

​

  • Who is responsible for responding to customer requests?

  • How are suppliers currently responding to requests?

  • How/where do suppliers keep the information they reference for a request?

5 Multi-Company Workshops with Parent & Child Companies

Goal: Understand how companies request information and how they would like those requests to be reported on

Aha! Moment: Parent company currently has no visibility into overlapping suppliers in Child companies

​

  • What is the cadence of requests to suppliers?

  • How do you send requests to a supplier?

  • What are the KPIs you are expected to report on?

Bi Weekly Customer Product Feedback

Goal: Recieve customer feedback on mocks and show work from previous sprint

Aha! Moment: Parent company needs and use cases take the highest priority 

​

  • Reach an internal understanding with the customer (parent company) of what our platform does and how it will support them in supplier information collection

  • Validate work and processes

Results: 3 Main User Personas & Key Building Blocks

Personas
1. 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:​

    • Understand supply chains for key materials

    • See overlap in sourcing to negotiate better pricing

    • Mitigate risks in supply and bad media
       

  • Key Insights​

    • Currently has data in various disparate forms and systems 

2. 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

3. 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:

    • Provide customers with the information they need so they can continue their working relationship

    • Show proof of certifications and audits​

​

  • Key Insights

    • Asked to report in many different ways and platforms

    • Needs to collect information from different departments and holdings to fulfill reports

Building Blocks For Successful Management
1. Supplier 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 place where suppliers can enter their contact, company, and certification information, and once that is shared with all requests they receive.

3. Company Side Centralized Reporting

A dashboard in the parent company and company flow where reporting is visualized on the different requests.

Product Strategy & Design: Supplier Profile & Centralized Requests

Supplier Profile

We started with scoping and designing the supplier side since this data feeds the request process and reporting. I designed with the following goals, considerations, and constraints. 

1. Faster Data Entry

Goal: Easily let suppliers enter and validate company and contact information

​

  • Integration with various industry APIs to provide unique identification and validation of identity 

  • Use Flatfile and other OCR services to allow as much automated entry as possible

  • Geo-location using Google map integration

  • Create our data layer that acts as an invisible "source of truth" for all mapping 

2. Easy Notifications

Goal: Create a notification system in the product that also notifies users via email

​

  • Design a notification center that users can easily access to see new requests for data 

  • Integrate with SendGrid to send out email notifications

  • Work with companies on integrating their branding into emails. Suppliers are motivated by seeing who is sending this request.

3. In-Platform Supplier Profile

Goal: Create a document and information storage area for suppliers to keep up to date

​

  • Create a customer permissioning area for suppliers

  • Customize what information a supplier shares with each customer

  • Document upload and file management

Centralized Requests

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. 

1. Multi-Persona Bulk Requests

Goal: Easily let companies create and send requests

​​

  • Use Flatfile and other OCR services to allow users to upload their known suppliers and check against our suppliers in the platform

  • For MVP, allow customers to upload requests for information in a spreadsheet and a PDF

  • Enable customers to bulk send these requests

2. Notification of Received Data

Goal: Utilize notifications for requests and to notify of received data

​

  • Use the notification center for surfacing when data is received 

  • Integrate with SendGrid to send out email notifications

  • Make received requests easy to download

3. Future State: Request Builder

Goal: Integrate with or build a form builder to create a standardized custom request format in the platform

​

  • Remove the need for customers to go outside the system 

  • Create request templates to guide customers in what types of information they need for specific audits or certificates

  • Standardize the format in which 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: What I Would Do Differently

1. Focus on mobile first for Supplier Onboarding

We added mobile responsiveness as a consideration after we had started the project due to our main users being desktop only. 

2. Push for more insight into other customers\verticals we serve

Building a tool based on one customer that needs to be customer and vertical agnostic is very difficult and we are already hearing from other customers' additonal requirements

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