Market Range Planning

Designed for merchandisers for maintaining range & volume of products for a selling season.

Client

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

Overview

Market Range Planning is a management application which enables users(Market merchandisers) to define product range for their market or countries for a season. It supports business processes for setting different types of product level targets such as prizes, sizes, account, forecast etc.

My Role

Full time UX Designer

Duration

12 Months

Team

3 Product Owners, 3 Tech Consultants, 2 Tech Architects, 2 UX Designers and 1 UX Manager

SERVICES

Product Planning Tool

Essentially, MRP serves as a tool to facilitate the ranging process across all markets and supports various business functionalities such as setting targets for prices, sizes, accounts, forecasts, and more. Moreover, MRP offers the functionality to designate articles as either Account exclusive or Market exclusive. This means that articles marked as exclusive are only available for ranging in specific accounts or markets.

The Market Range Planning (MRP) application plays a pivotal role in this process by incorporating regional insights and launching articles into markets based on demand.

It helps define how products can be distributed to different markets across the world in a systematic manner.

Ranging an article is the process of introducing it into the market for sale.

For example, market Middle-East North Africa includes countries such as Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan. So, each market can choose the set of articles which they want to market/sell as per their analysis. For example, a jersey designed with the national flag logo of one country may not sell well in another country and hence the products need to be market specific.

Market refers to a geographical location grouped according to Summit's(client) marketing structure.

Market & Ranging Process

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, it is critical to be able to view two data sets(ranges) at a time to compare and analyse information. Moreover, having the flexibility and choice to focus on either one or two data sets at a time as needed would immensely help users to review data faster.

2

It would immensely help users if they could visually see which articles have already been ranged from the source range to their target range which they have opened on their workspace. Moreover, they must only see actions based on their role and permissions.

3

In the legacy application, it is not possible for users to view the article ranges for markets or countries other than their own. However, for transparency and harmonising the process, users must have the access to view data for other markets and countries.

4

To fulfil the E2E user journey on the platform, the users should have the option to create article placeholders and assign values to them. This would enable them to start creating the data for their range even before real articles are available in the system.

Key Insights

Notifications and visual feedback

Incorporated visual feedback for actions that impact the data values in some way. It would improve the experience as users can receive a confirmation for the executed actions and be able to track progress and results.

Placeholder creation functionality

Ability to create placeholder articles within an article range. Creation would be enabled through a modal as it is an important action and the user would need to stay focused while doing it. It would also facilitate creation of multiple placeholders at a time.

Easily switch between market sub-levels

Created option for users to select the market level/sub-level for which they would like to review the data for. Having all the options under the menu with the market structure hierarchy reflected offers clarity of options.

Ranging functionality

Introduced functionality to select articles from a range and then range it to other sub-levels under a market. Bringing this user journey from offline tools to the range planning platform would ensure users have transparency on the status of articles.

Split View

Created a Split View to enable users to view upto two sets of article ranges(datasets). Upon hovering over the view divider, users can view options to resize the views within limits or collapse one of them.

Solutions

Clickable Prototype

Key Issues to be addressed

How might we simplify the user journeys to reduce the cognitive load on the user?
How might we enable users to easily compare range for 2 different market levels?
How might we enable users to receive accurate feedback on their actions and track progress?
How might we visualise the user’s working area to reduce a lot of effort that goes into finding the right actions?

Legacy Application for MRP

Currently, the existing Market Range Planning(MRP) application, enables users to perform their tasks. However, the application is 25 years old and unable to satisfy the current user needs. Managing simple tasks becomes cumbersome due to the excessive functionalities and extra steps to perform simple tasks, making it overly crowded.

Market Range Planning(MRP) legacy application view

Legacy application UI for Market Range Planning(MRP)

Therefore, users need to view & edit the market range(data) to :

familiarize themselves with the market range
analyze for range gaps and overlaps
define & update their market level range based on insights
feedback to other market counterparts about their analysis for further actions

For every season, market merchandisers(users) need to maintain the product range which they would like to introduce in their market or sub-levels under the market.

Range Planning is an iterative process and users might have to repeat the process multiple times until they select their optimal range of products which comply with their financial targets and brand positioning.