Case Study #1 URBN Vendor Reporting System
During a Summer Internship, I worked at URBN as an industrial engineering intern. For the first half of the internship, I learned the intricacies of the fulfillment and distribution centers, and the specifics of URBN’s supply chain. I also assisted the engineering and supple chain team with all projects and tasks. For my final project, I designed and built a reporting system for the warehouse to log vendor tasks and information.
Role
UI, UX, Application Design
Timeline
10 weeks, Summer 2018
Client
URBN
Team Goals
The goals of the supply chain team were to
Optimize the space in the Gap, PA warehouses
Expand the business by building more fulfillment centers
Streamline internal processes and minimize the amount of inaccurate data
To work on goal 3, I was tasked with cleaning up an excel spreadsheet that was used companywide by fulfillment center employees to report vendor related tasks and information
Current Process
The initial process was a simple excel spreadsheet where data was manually submitted by warehouse employees. The data was was filled with errors and inaccuracies, resulting in inaccurate vendor reports.
Insights
Here is what I gathered from 1) the notes I made 2) the warehouse employees I interviewed 3) my skip level manager, who took the responsibility of cleaning the file each week (20+ hours of labor)
Lacks Accuracy
Misspelled vendor names
Information left out in entries
Lacks Security
Vendor information could be accessed by all employees
Entries were deleted by mistake
Solution
Replaced an error filled manually inputted excel spreadsheet
Streamlined and categorized accurate vendor data entries
Saved 20+ hours of manual spreadsheet clean up
My final design did not allow for much manual entry, so most information was included in drop down menus. I wrote a level of error handling that would prevent users from entering erroneous strings.
Lacks organization
There were multiple spellings of the same vendors, actions, supplies, locations, etc; so the data could not be categorized or organized
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