Context
As the business aligns with B2B as a future revenue driver, we must prepare for that business scaling. Our current B2B system requires manual editing of spreadsheets, and there is no linkage of the shipments back to any customer or billing data. The new B2B Order Management System will begin to fill in this picture by providing the “base” objects that things like shipments, invoices, and other types of information can hang off of, as well as providing an interface to manage the orders and customers.
Duration
December 2022-Present
Team
I was one of two Product Designers working alongside:
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Product Manager
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Engineering Lead
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B2B Fulfillment Team
Skills
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Product Strategy
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Competitive Analysis
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Interaction & Visual Design
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Prototyping
Problem Statement
"How might we scale the B2B business by building an order system to manage and inject their shipments?"
Old vs New Process
The screenshot below visualizes the old workflow for managing B2B orders versus the flow we hope to implement with the new order management system.
The old workflow relies on uploading a CSV that has been manually put together, while the new flow will be based on client-created accounts with recurring order cadences that generate weekly and automate the process of injecting shipments into distribution.
Understanding Specifications
My fellow designer and I began this project by going through the engineering specifications with our engineering lead to make sure we understood any constraints and requirements for the designs
Mapping Out Requirements
We were able to use the specs as a guide to help us understand the requirements needed for the designs. We identified each of the different screens within the system like Account Creation, Profile, Order Cadence Creation, and more and clearly listed out the required functionality for each of these views so that we had a list of what needs to be included for each one.
Understanding the System
One of the most important, but challenging parts of this project was understanding what exactly we were designing.
-Org level then account level then
Competitive Analysis
Our next step was researching existing solutions to the problem we were solving for. We wanted to see what competitors are doing to solve this, and whether or not it is effective.
Surveying the Market
We studied existing order management systems from companies like IBM, BrightPearl, and more to identify weaknesses and strengths in their designs.
From this analysis we uncovered the following:
• Making sure the designs are task-centered
• Considering how users currently solve these tasks
• The importance of solid data visualization
Design Explorations
After gaining a good understanding the design requirements and taking inspiration from other successful order management systems we moved into exploring visual designs
Admin Design System
Thankfully, Freshly has a loose set of components for internal tools and B2B products that helped tremendously with beginning to visualize this project.
