The status quo was far away from a paperless and digital work environment. Whenever smaller customers are ordering steel from the warehouses, they’re sending a mail with attached pdfs, containing their needs. Every customer has its own format and layout of how the table looks like, where the measurements or quantities are listed eg.
One third of the working day of a sales representative is spent for the manual order entry process. Typing the Pdfs into the system is very time-consuming and has a high error-rates.
We started with a research phase and visited our sales colleagues in the US, to see how they work and how their work day can be improved. Armed with a questions guide, we interviewed and observed many branches.
“It ´s like cooking, I rather cook,
than do all the chopping up front.”
Sales Person on order entry process
In several sessions we created hundreds of sticky notes, sorted and clustered them. Soon we extracted the main insights of the users, that were the foundation for the personas.
It would have been beneficial to the developers and everyone else, who didn’t take part at the research, to also get to know the insights. On realizing this challenge, I set up knowledge sharing sessions that would enable other to catch up and be on the same page regarding our users and how they work.
After analyzing the interviews, we synthesized all information. Based on the synthesis, we were able to start the ideation phase with a broad approach.
We wanted to give the sales representatives more time for their actual work and their customers, not to spend too much time on the order entry.
We tried different approaches of how to process orders and went from paper to wireframe to clickable to functional prototype within a few weeks.
During the process, we evaluated our status quo in several steps, from wireframes to prototypes. We found out, that the sales people not only are responsible for their own customers, but also take over customers of colleagues, when they’re out of office. Therefor we came up with a watchlist feature, that allows to set a temporary filter for customers of colleagues.
The solution we came up with, provides sales people an order inbox showing only their own customers, but also enables them to put those customers on a watchlist, they have to take over every now end then.
After the user opens an order from his inbox, he gets to a detail view that provides him every important information about the order, automatically extracted from the Pdf. Therefor we are using an AI system that learns the layout of each customer. The sales person only has to check and confirm or correct the results of the parsing system.
For better verification, a hover on the results effects a highlighting on the original data in the pdf. If the credentials like parts, quantity, etc. are right, the order will be saved in the system and is ready for the production to prepare the products for shipping.
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