Range Segmentation & Phasing

Designed for merchandisers for maintaining distribution networks for products.

Client

Summit - a German multinational corporation that designs and manufactures shoes, clothing & accessories.

Overview

Range Segmentation & Phasing is a tool which enables Global Merchandisers to define & manage the distribution networks for individual articles. The tool offers key functionalities focused to help users have an overview of data such as column manager, linked attributes, mass assignment etc.

My Role

Full time UX Designer

Duration

8 Months

Team

1 Product Owner, 1 Tech Consultant, 1 Tech Architect, 1 UX Designer(myself) and 1 UX Manager

SERVICES

Product Planning Tool

Problem Statement

At Summit, global merchandisers(users) need to assign the sales channels for articles at the Global level. Sales channels are groups of distribution networks through which the company sells their products to customers. The users need to do this activity twice a year. Currently this process is done heavily through excel documents and internal applications.

With the current volume of products that Summit releases each season, in-use tools are barely meeting the user’s needs as they are disconnected leading to inaccuracies in data. It became crucial to build ‘Range Segmentation & Phasing’ tool which enables users navigate their E2E journey on a single platform and reduce the gaps in the process. The tool must be flexible and scalable.

Some key issues that had to be addressed were:

How to enable users to manage the complex list view with roughly 100 columns?
How do we enable users mass update articles?
How do we manage in-line editing for conditional attributes?

Goals & Expectations

To accurately assign segmentation to articles.
To easily arrange and view data.
Stay updated on information that impacts business decisions.
Save time and effort for simple tasks.

Ahmet Yurdakul

Global Merchandiser at Summit

38 M · Moderately Skilled in Technology

Ahmet is a mid-senior level global merchandiser responsible for defining segmentation for articles under his business segment. His decisions are informed by market landscape and sales patterns from past seasons. He usually has 6 weeks time to define where articles need to be made available. He aims to complete this task with precision, recognising its influence on the company's sales, profit margins, and revenue targets.

To map out the steps a user takes to accomplish a specific task or goal within the current system, we drafted the user journey to gather insights.

User Journey Map

1

For users, reviewing data on the legacy system is a challenge because the view is inflexible and there is no way to rearrange the long list of up to 100 columns.

2

In the legacy tool, one of the primary pain point for users had been to validate inaccurate data. They are mostly using MS excel for updates and could only identify inaccuracies at a much later stage of the process which results in a lot of multi-fold rework.

3

It is a challenge for the users to use the legacy application for mass updates as it misses critical copy paste functionalities integrated with validation.

4

Tracking the status of each article; whether segmentation has been defined for it or not is difficult to manage in Excel as it does not offer real time status mapping for articles. The users have to manually check and track.

Key Insights

Advanced List View

Created an advanced list view to enable users easily manage and keep track of articles at one place. It features the following:

Tabs for switching between related screens.
Filters for viewing target articles.
Columns for up to 100 attributes and column sets functionality to manage the view.
Conditional attributes and error handling within the list view.

Column Sets & Manager

Introduced a column set functionality featuring predefined and custom column sets. It enables users to manage the appearance of the list view as per their needs. It offers flexible settings like adding columns to view, arrange them in desired order, pin and remove columns.

Linked Attributes

We had to find out a way to clearly indicate to the users the linked/conditional attributes in their view. Linked attributes in the product are defined as attributes which cannot be updated in isolation, the users should define values for both attributes. We solved editing user journeys for linked attributes to help users understand the behaviour clearly. The same had to be reflected in the column set settings.

Mass Update Functionality

Crafted a mass update feature allowing users to collectively select multiple records from the list and execute actions on them simultaneously. Ensuring clear visibility of chosen articles and available update choices was pivotal for this functionality. This solution enhances efficiency, particularly for tasks such as modifying values across various attributes for numerous articles.