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.