Identify
Understanding of the challenge and initial stragegic survey;
Identify the problem
The company came with an issue about the IBP process, that is an strategic part of the business. This process is responsible for doing the demand and the production planning of everything that they need. It's a process that looks into the future, and tries to aim the real necessities about sales and materials that will need to be done.
Problems that it was already mapped:
Double work
Issues with data
Multiple sources of data
Intensive labour in fill the informations
Immersion
Dive deep into the problem, structure and do interviews with the users;
Certainties, Doubts and Suppositions
They trying to look foward 36 months in the future what the company will need to process
The company needs to preview which material will need
Users use spreadsheets to do this tasks and also need to input in CRM
Users care about how put the information, how it works, if it is easy to use, how it will look like but the demand plan area cares if the information is right
Certainties
The solution must be manipulated, allows to make tests, add new opportunities and vulnerabilities
The user will have the opportunity to make tests in the future
Is important to bring all closed opportunities to the demand plan
The user needs to see or have a vision about the demand plan inside the opportunities
Suppositions
How we transform an opportunity in CRM into a real opportunity
There's a chance of one opportunity transform into vulnerability
The solution will gave to deamand plan team insights inside the CRM
Doubts
Empathize
Dive deep into the problem, structure and do interviews with the users;
Interviews
It was made interviews with different types of users of different areas to understand what was the pains of each users related to the main hypotesis
To transform the qualitative informations of interviews into a more quantitative we marked the hilights and divided in two groups:
Pain Points (PP):
All pains of users and informations that are crucial of the flow
Oportunities (OP):
All informations that can be an improvement or other functionality to product
Most common tags:
OP - Demand plan business rules
PP - Demand plan extra work
OP - Demand plan unify the databases
OP - Demand plan making tests
OP - Reduce double work
Synthesize
Compile the main informations, structure process flow and values exchange;
As-Is journey
Understanding the value exchanging
Proto personas
Jennifer
28 years
Sales person
She is a energetic woman, who travels a lot to make visits to customers
She gets frustrating because after a visit she needs to make a double work and input the same information in two different places
She gets frustrating because after a visit she needs to make a double work and input the same information in two different places
Yuta
35 years
Sales manager
Yuta is from Korea, and he is a very serious person
He needs to get all the information about the sales in two different places and compile into one thing
He doesn’t understand why he needs to use the CRM because the excel works
He doesn’t use Dynamics very often
He has monthly meetings with the head of sales of his region
Brandon
33 years
Facilitator
He is a canadian who loves hot chocolate
He always running into the sales managers to complete their tasks and input the informations in spreadsheet
He always gets angry because people wait to input all the information in the last time, so he always working until late.
He spend a lot of time trying to fix some troubles with the spreadsheets, and reviewing double information that he gets
Patricia
46 years
Head of IBP demmand plann
She loves food, especially vatapá
She is always trying to get all the information she needs
She needs to make a report of her region, but always there are miss information
She has hard conversations with the strategic team of the company, it's exhausting to her
Core values
She needs to input information in 2 places
It's time consuming because the double work
It's exhausting redo one task
She spends part of her day in sites from a customer it doesn’t have time to spend
Always needs to update some miss information
More time more sales
Facility in work tools
Have all the information that she needs in its hands
Agility
Find some information about his area
Need to look in different places to get all the information that he needs
Always need to notify someone about a mistake or missinformation
Always need to review all the data with his superiors and facilitators
Accurate information
Centralised information
Precision
Reduce time spent in daily activities
Agility
Much time spent just to confirm and correct some information
Do a lot of extra work
Need to do a lot of alignment meetings
Feels that his job could be easily change for some automatic feature
Double work
Right informations
Informations connected
Fewer meetings to correct wrong information and more time to do strategic meeting
More time to do his analysis
Agility
Has to schedule a bunch of meeting to review information
Receive wrong information
Make analysis which could have bad accuracy
Knows that what she needs demands a enormous labour intensive from sales people and facilitatiors
Doesn’t like the manipulation of she needs to do
Knows that nobody is administering the vulnerabilities in Dynamics
Accurate information
Centralised information
Precise data
More time to do her others tasks
Agility
Define
Understanding and set the main problem definition, prepare to ideation;
Problem definition
To help the team we decided to use the problem definition framework to set the goals and clarify the main problem to be solved, evaluating the cause and the possible impacts.
Cause
Labour intensive and extended double work in different areas
Impact
Many hours to review, gather and meetings to check informations
Impacted Persona
Sales person, Sales manager, Facilitator, IBP team, Demand plan team
Severity
Cost hours of employees for the company, mistrust of data, wrong demand plans that it causes financial expenses for the company
Product discovery challenge
We also decided to choose one challenge guide the team through the discovery process. and it's focused in the team's purpose defined previously.
Want reduce double work, improve the process of sales people, make strategic and assertive plans and become a trustful area of company
Sales and IBP processes
Transform the Dynamics as the main tool of Sales and connect the servers of company
Ideate
Gatherer ideas and insights by a a group activities that could solve the problem;
How might we
To start the ideation phase we did a how might sentence we tool together with main stakeholders. This tool allows to turns the problems found and insights into possibilities by reframing them.
With each question we had discussions about it and turn those questions with more significant insights, creating a backlog of options to attack each one.
Brainwirting
Another tool to enhance the discovery insights that was made is the Brainwriting. This technique consists in participants write ideas onto cards and then pass their idea/cards to the next person, moving those cards around the group in a circle as participants build on the ideas of others.
Create input table in CRM for IBP opportunities
Change links for IBP Power BI reports to get information from the new Dynamics table
Create rule to automatize input of IBP data base on previously month so the user only have do adjust it
Create a rule of the time of the V&Os can be add in the demand plan
Reducing the double work
Create possibility to copy an item
Create dashboards to users
Maybe have also the possibility to link the future form of IBP in the CRM to the IBP PowerBI
Make the user experience easier as possible
Create the possibility to share the specific item by mail if the user thinks he/she needs stronger validation
Create a vision of all dashboards of v&OS
Unified in the crm
Create rules to input data in Dynamics
Easy way to validate those datas
Create process to import the spreadsheets automaticaly
Sends notification to user about wrong data during the import, but importing all other records that are fine
We could also input the wrong one, having it linked to the notification and a tag meaning that it's a draft, we the user doesn't need to fill every field again
The data should be sourced from CRM and not be bulk created each month. If a bulk edit process is required, we can use the OOB one
Card 3
And more…
Rupture hypotesis
Cliches
Hypotesis
Idea
Define
Understanding and set the main problem definition, prepare to ideation;
Solution definition
To define which pain points and opportunities the solution will solve we dicided to use the It is/it isn't/ it does/ it doesn't matrix. It will help also to set out what functionalities the solution will and will not have.
IT IS
New type of record
Vulnerabilities is always negative
A view for V&Os
IT ISN'T
Upload feature
IT DOES DO
Reach the opportunities that already exists
Download a spreadsheet of the V&Os
Organise the V&Os by the OPG, so we can use only one table
Match the opp. id with the id from the ibp
Send the data for ibp team (second wave)
IT DOESN'T DO
Solve all the error datas
Impact and effort matrix
It identifies the weights of each solution, it's interesting to use it in scenarios that need to compare and flatten several options. It's necessarily to tapping the best way to go on.
High Impact
Small Effort
Create additional fields that we don’t have in Dynamics for Opp.
View for Vulnerabilities & Opportunities
Create a new type of record
High Impact
Medium Effort
Organise the V&Os by the OPG, so we can use only one table
Download a spreadsheet of the V&Os
How might we improve the quality of our information that users input?
High Impact
High Effort
Create a script for populate the new fields
Experiment
Define how the problem will be attacked, and create prototypes;
New flow proposal
We also made a desk research by analysing the hole sales flow inside the product. This decision was made because the solution will impact the decisions that company will make in the future.
Another point that we wanted to understand was the usuability of the product, try to see possibilities to improve the consumption of datas that already exists in the product and reduce the number of inputs for users.
Review and new entities proposal:
It was observed similarities with some entities and also the creation for another entity.
A readjustment was proposed for the Leads entities, change and creation of Vulnerabilities and Opportunities in addition to the creation of another Sales entity.
In addition it was observed that the way the entities were built were more complex than their concepts.
Input a new lead
Discover a new V&Os
Follow up the V&Os
If it is an opportunity that become a good one
Continue to the Sales step and the Sales process
Solution
For decision to implement the solution we decided to introduce the final solution to Opportunity Product Group (OPG). To introduce this alternative we already needed to update the entity of OPG, add a few columns and create a new vision for the tables of V&Os and a new form to input the Vulnerabilities.
Validate
Make tests with users, uderstand see what is the best way to implement the solution;
User tests
To know the viability of the final solution we sent a user test using the Maze application whitout assistance or meeting.
It was choosen 12 main users of the product to do the test and find out if the solution will help the users and also gather the information that business needed.
Opportunity path:
Average Success
69,2%
Vulnerability path:
Average Success
66.7%
Follow
Implement the solution; measure with metrics the usability;
Metrics
The last step of the discovery process is to define the right metrics for the solution. This will allow us to understand and validate the if the solution purposed was a success and if it bring value to the company.
North Star Metrics
Percentage people of main user's team that open new opportunities
Weekly review of the number of new V&Os
Percentage of upload success
Activation/adoption
Number of users that created vulnerabilities
Percentage people of main user's team that open new opportuninities
Number users over time
Percentage main user team that continue using the solution over time
Number of new opportunities clicked ibp relevant flag
Percentage of main team and their existing opportunities and follow the number of the team (child metric)
Percentage of new users that created new opp. and vuln.
Number of new opportunities clicked ibp relevant flag (child metric)
Engajement
Total number of users X number of users that created new V&O
Quantity of opp. that wasn’t modified for the last X (period)
Weekly review of the number of new V&Os (child metric)
Number of V&Os created by main user's team by a period (weekly)
Task Success
Percentage of V&Os finished by an period (compare with the end date)
Speed the users entered an opportunity
Upload success
Quantity of 75% probability opp. created and wasn’t modify in an period setted as ibp relevant in opg (compare with the end date)
Quantity of 75% probability opp. created and wasn’t modify in an period (compare with the end date)
Revenue
Track the total revenue passing by ibp by month / year
Track the total value of vulnerability by month / year
Track the total number tons passing on ibp by month / yeah
Retention
Numbers of users using the feature and stay using it for an period
Numbers of users of main user's team using the feature and stay using it for an period (1, 2, 3 mont / 6 / 12 month)
See the numbers by regions for period and compare
Numbers of new users using the feature and stay using it for a period
Happiness
Satisfaction rate
Promoters metric
Acquisition
Percentage of main user team are really using the solution
Post research
Gains and problems
Gains
Improvement in the demmand plan strategies;
Centralized information;
It's not necessary anymore one employee to review the datas and also it will not be necessary the use of Citrix, reducing the costs for company with other product;
Reduction of time spent filling sales information by sales people;
It's not necessary the facilitator role anymore;
Information included in the sales flow;
More accuracy in demand plan.
Problems
There were important points not prioritezed that can continue causing problems for users;
The solution still has more business apporach than user necessities;
Some business rules were still unokwn untill the development stage;
Due business priorization the team needed to develop the solution with a few refinement, this caused unforeseen and problems with the development because of some changes and business rules;
Despite the round of interviews it was necessary to understand more about the real problem with the hole flow proposed and the impacts that will had.
After 1 year of implementation
Users changed the use of spreadsheets and SAP to the final solution.
The final solution become the most used feature of the product by users