Building a Supply Chain Solution to help people Manage and Maintain Gas Life Cycle.
Building a Supply Chain Solution to help people Manage and Maintain Gas Life Cycle.
Building a Supply Chain Solution to help people Manage and Maintain Gas Life Cycle.
Gas Management System
My Role
UX Design: Interaction Design, Sketching, Interaction Design, Prototyping.
Team
Product Designer
Product Manager
Senior Designer
Engineers
Timeline
3 months.
Background
Indian supply chain industry is complex and require specialized software to manage effectively. Our goal was to develop an in-house solution that makes supply chain management transparent, efficient, and error-free.
Problem Breakdown
The Beginning
A Company was specialized in warehousing and order fulfillment for Supplying Gas Cylinders in Direct to Consumer and Business to Business Segment.
The project initiated after brief conversations with our stakeholders. We learned a lot about the Indian Supply Chain Challenges, Deliveries, Warehousing, etc..
The main problems were :
Unable to scale up due to manual operations.
Lot of Human Dependencies to maintain accurate documentation leading to ton of errors.
Revenue loss due to malpractice.
Absence of real time visibility and Lack of Streamline processes.
These challenges result in inefficiencies, errors, and potential safety risks. The current manual processes and lack of centralized systems lead to difficulties in tracking and issuing the cylinders.
The current manual processes for managing gas cylinders result in inefficiencies, such as time-consuming tasks, errors in tracking, and difficulties in maintaining accurate stock levels.
So, by then our vision was clear -
How Might We Help the business to Address the challenges faced in the entire Gas life-cycle Supply Chain ?
Understanding user's ecosystem
To understand the user challenges, we visited the newly created gas warehouse storage and noted how a particular warehouse and delivery functions in AVL.
As part of the process, we did not had enough time to do perform extensive research, so we did a light form of field visit to understand the ecosystem challenges and its problems.
Based on our observations of the how the entire ecosystem functions, we noted down key pointers about how the entire supply chain works and the business and user problems.
Design in action
Understanding Phases in Supply Chain and their User’s role :
There are different user's in the supply chain, so understanding how they function across each phases was a critical factor.
User’s in the Ecosystem -
Store Operator / Manager
Lab Operator / Manager
Plant Head
Phase 1 : Receiving and Tracking of Cylinders.
The Store Manager will overlook and manage huge amount of the cylinders info. The cylinders will be manually registered by Store Operator to make the cylinders traceable and get it ready to be received by anyone makes a special request.
Phase 2 : Issuance of Cylinders.
Once all this setup is processed, the Lab Manager will raise a request for cylinders. On the other side, The managers approves the request and assigns a person from lab operator, In the meanwhile, the store operator will issue the gas cylinders.
Phase 3 : Cylinder Installation at Gas Bank.
and once the Gas cylinders is issued by the Store operator, The assigned Lab operator will install the gas cylinder in its own gas yard on a proper assigned location.
Phase 4 : Monitoring the Cylinders.
All the different states/phases of gas cylinders will be continuously be monitored and the plant head will also continuously monitor its configuration and consumption details to see if it requires any immediate action.
What was I responsible for ?
When we started moving ahead, I was responsible for designing two experiences :
Cylinder Issuance and Installation Experience : Phase 02 and Phase 03.
I drew this experience map to better understand how Cylinders are Issued and Installed in the entire ecosystem.
Based on the insights and observation, our team created User personas, Scenarios, Task prioritization and Workflows.
Redefining Problems
I brainstormed possible solutions and created concepts, wireframes and clickable prototypes for all the experiences under my scope of work.
Problem # 1
Missing Communication and collaboration gap.
To fix this,
A bar code system was implemented. A unique bar code seal is generated and pasted on for each gas cylinders which contains the yard location, name and concentration value. How does this help ?, well it helps the store manager to keep all the details traceable in order to avoid confusion with overlapping multiple request raised by the Lab Manager.
Built a robust system of sending and receiving of the request in real time between Store and Lab Manager. Any form of indescrepencies such as “Non availability of Gas” or “Mismatch requirement or requirement cannot be fulfilled” is addressed so that operations can run smooth.
Problem # 2
Missing real time status to be informed.
Each time a Gas Cylinders moves through different phases, it becomes difficult for the Store Manager to handle multiple request with multiple use-cases. To tackle this, I carefully designed different system checkpoints for tracking the status.
Enabling Store and Lab Operators capturing details through mobile app whenever the gases are issued or installed. If anything goes wrong, the system is alerted on Store and Lab Managers in real time to ensure prompt resolution.
Problem # 3
Manual toil required to handle gas allocation to gas requests.
- Everyone needed to do a lot of calling because of poor visibility. User faces a manual toil to handle such requests with different critical error handling scenarios which they might end up with information loss.
So I created end to end workflows with clear distinct steps with all the critical error handling and use-cases to ensure that user does not have to worry and think a lot about any thing to be encounter.
Here the most challenging part was to defined proper edge cases and error cases which might make or break the experience. The experience was designed to reduce manual toiling.
Problem # 4
Real time update for important events.
Store and Lab Manager is both notified on their smartphone through messages for any important events that took place such as Cylinder mismatch, Accidental Cause, Installation Issues, Low Threshold limit, Miscellaneous problems.
While the notifications are sent in the application, high severe type of events are directly sent to their phone, asking for any immediate action, so that the problem can be resolved.
Challenges..
This project had a lot of challenges including understanding how different users interact within the ecosystem.
Also, When designing multiple interactions i had to keep two things in my mind -
How the data is being fed in the system ?
And how different users interact with those data.
This was also challenging since multiple users were accessing different touchpoints of the experience.
Understanding these two key things are very important when you’re working on Key Scenarios and Workflows.
The Impact
Reduced no. of customer calls in their team by around ~ 60%.
Eliminated mismanagement of gas cylinders around ~ 70%
Digitizing the workflows instantly improved the efficiency against the manual work.
It has reduced the operations cost by around ~20 % due to maximum resource utilization creating a long term sustainability solution.
Key Learnings
Clarify your assumptions.
Solutions can be simple.
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