Adding factory and warehouse
Bringing in factories and warehouse information into the Supplier Management application to help procurement users make more informed decisions
Challenge
Buyers not getting complete visibility into the manufacturers and warehouses that their suppliers use.
Ricky
Supplier manager
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Establish a long-term strategic relationship with our suppliers
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Identify opportunities to develop a robust supplier base that meets our organizational business requirements.
Allina
Commodity manager
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Strategize for a commodity when triggered by the business
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Resolve issues with supplier performance
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Monitor compliance of the suppliers and their third-parties
Problem
Meet Ricky. Ricky is a Supplier manager responsible for managing supplier relationships in his company. Ricky needs to evaluate potential suppliers who could meet the business needs thoroughly. He onboards suppliers into the supplier management application. To do this, Ricky needs to research and identify different suppliers and sub-contractors to get insights into any potential compliance risks that may occur with the supply chain.
Getting risk information is not an easy task. Ricky needs to log in to multiple systems such as ERP system, Supplier management, Supplier risk, and SAP Ariba Sourcing, etc., and carefully map out the relationships between those suppliers entities using an excel spreadsheet.
Allina is a Commodity manager, she needs to qualify all supplier's facilities to gather their information based the region and business units. Qualifying these supplier's different locations, factories and warehouses could take as long as 3-6 months.
Business impact
To make informed procurement decisions, 48% of customers strongly need SM (Supplier management) to get a complete picture of their suppliers' various business functions such as their factories, warehouses, shipping, and billing addresses. We needed to act fast on these needs to increase customer satisfaction and retain our valuable customers. ​
Key expected outcomes
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Increased number of qualifications processes
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Reduced overall time taken for onboarding supplier and their different business functions
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Increased revenue
UX Strategy and planning
Understanding the current process
We, a team of 3 Product managers, 1 Product designer, 1 Project manager, 2 Backend architects, conducted workshops with 13 large enterprise customers and mapped out their current process to understand the gaps and opportunities.
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From the workshop, It became clear to us that different industries' business processes vary enormously. Some of them have started to standardize and streamline this evaluation process of multiple levels of their suppliers. In contrast, others have scattered and manual process flow for the same.
We created the high-level object models of the suppliers' relationships with their child entities and then created user journeys of our target users and validated them.
The purpose of creating the current process journey map is to get a high-level overview of the current system as a user interacts with it. We identified their concerns and needs at each phase. The onboarding process could take months due to missing information such as factories and warehouses because of endless back and forth emails between the buyer and their main supplier contact. When the buyers send a registration request to the main supplier, they cannot request information about their child entities.
Top 3 insights
1. Supplier managers need their suppliers to add all their business entities to evaluate them as a trusted partners.
2. To evaluate the business viability and potential risk involved with their supplier, Supplier managers need to communicate directly with the supplier's contracted business entities for faster onboarding.
3. Buyers request the factory information during sourcing events in RFI/RFP, but those need to be saved as part of the suppliers profile for future evaluations.
Solutioning
We created How Might We questions to generate various opportunities. Then we generated many different ideas to come up with solutions to answering the HMW questions we selected. Then we voted on the ideas that we wanted to explore more in-depth. This was a 2 days process with the intent to keep broadening our solutions and then finally narrowing them down to the most feasible ideas with high impact.
Most voted solutions
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Give Supplier manager the ability to collect factory information during main supplier registration as part of the onboarding process
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Display the factories of a supplier in the search results and in supplier’s profile pages (Supplier 360), so that buyer users always have visibility into which factories, warehouses, etc. (sub-contracted partners) their suppliers have
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Give the Supplier manager a way to send qualification/due diligence surveys to the factories directly without having to go through the parent supplier. (In order to do that each of those business partners needed to be created as an object)
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Provide a full 360 detailed view of the factories (similar to supplier 360) including the qualification information, certificates, etc. so that the supplier managers can evaluate them when needed.
Constraints
1. Few UI developers
2. Reuse existing components (with minimal changes)
3. Constraints in the backend architecture changes
Storyboard
User flows
Old UI
User testing
Design explorations
Factory detail view layout explorations
Search page
New UI
Approval page
Factory page
Search page
Improved search page experience with filters to find a specific type of business entities and invite the non-registered suppliers from there.
Factory approval
Main supplier approval page now has factories/warehouses added as part of it for supplier manager to review and approve.
Supplier profile
Updated the Supplier profile page to make it consistent with the Fiori design systems floorplans and added the Sourcing, Qualification, and Risk information which are shown as per the role of the user.
Approval tasks
All approval tasks for the approvers in a table view. Approver can see the statuses and navigate through the list to view details of the supplier's responses from here.
Qualify factory
Users can now strat a qualification from the factory page to qualify a specific commodity.
Other business partners
All business partners of a suppliers are listed under the Business partners tab for better visibility into their relationships with different business entities.
Factory qualification (Monitor and assessment)
Problem
Previously in SAP Ariba, Commodity managers from the buyer organization could only send qualification surveys to their main supplier, not to their factories/other business partners, which was problematic in terms of doing proper evaluation to onboard or vet those suppliers. Most large customers from various industries have raised this issue with our product offering and shared their concerns.
Discovery
There were 2 parts to the discovery phase.
1. Mapping out the current process of adding a qualification survey, identifying the gaps
2. Analyzing current UI and finding opportunities to make improvements
After several meetings and discussions on the best possible workflow, we decided to reuse most of the process flow framework that already existed for supplier qualification with some added functionalities )to meet the user needs. Below is the new page design that now includes the Qualification process for factories/business partners.
Qualification of categories
Wizard for creating new qualification
Prototype
Next steps
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Streamline the supplier side onboarding experience
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Improve collaboration between supplier facilities
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Integrate with external applications used by our customers to bring in more risk information to Supplier profile
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Showing users the opportunities for optimization.