NewStore: Mobile Inventory Management

Role

Lead product designer

Skills

Mobile, research, UX, UI, strategy

Team

Product designer (me), product manager, engineering team

What is inventory management?

Inventory management in a store involves keeping track of all the products or items available for sale. It includes tasks like receiving inventory to the store, transferring between stores, counting the stock to match with data, and performing occasional adjustments as needed. The goal is to ensure that the store always knows exactly what products they have available for selling. A good inventory management system helps the store avoid running out of stock, overselling, minimizing costs, and maximizing efficiency.

Situation

NewStore's goal is to make it possible to sell every sellable item at full price. For that, the retailer must know exactly how many products they have and where they are located. For a long time, NewStore's omnichannel management based its stock data on external ERPs. Due to that the stock was often not up to date and caused distrust among the associates and customers. The path forward was to create a NewStore-owned inventory management system. The system would be the source and any update (eg. mPOS, receiving, adjustments) would be instantaneous.

Visualizing inventory management

Problem Space

The goal of the solution was to provide for NewStore, for the retailer management, and also for their store employees.

The biggest pain points discovered were

inaccurate stock numbers which made the solution from NewStore seem unreliable;
slow stock updates, the stock was not updated in real-time;
very waterfall / top-down style approach to inventory management, which didn’t allow quick changes for the goods or resources according to the situation at hand;
store associates have little chance to influence stock info in case of damages, found items, or discrepancies;

retailer has to run multiple systems that need to be integrated and communicate with each other, hard to find errors in the system. It’s also costly for the retailer themselves to run multiple systems.

The project started with a duo of a product designer (me) and a product manager. I was responsible for all the usability and design-related tasks across this project.

Wireframe chaos after story mapping session

Process and my contribution

I started the project with many interviews with stakeholders as I needed to gather an understanding of the topic. Additionally, I did desk research and benchmarking as I was about to enter a new industry for me.
After the initial research, as a team, we decided to iterate based on the flow of stock in-store:

Receiving - bring the products into the store;
Counting - to confirm the stock is correct;
Transfers - to make it possible to send items between stores;
Adjustments - to adjust random discrepancies, and how to introduce them to the system and managers/overseers.

Each area included going through the product design process, partly in parallel to each other.

My contributions covered:

interviews with stakeholders
desk research
user journeys,
benchmarking
wireframing
user flows
information architecture
visual design
prototypes
client interviews
cognitive walkthroughs

Black hat session with engineering team

Outcome

The effort allowed NewStore to take control of the customer stock levels.
At the time I left NewStore, 18 of 30 retailers were using the inventory management system, and the others planning to move based on ERP and deployment availability.
Associates are able to manage the inventory digitally in-store. The stock is updated in real-time and management knows exactly where their products are at a given point in time.
Interviews with store employees revealed the time to receive inventory has been reduced by about 50%

A motivating success story

An area manager was on a call with a store employee at the start of a new season. The employee expected to spend the next 4 hours receiving inventory to the store stock, but they called back in 40 minutes to let them know all the inventory was received and ready to be sold.