My client is one of the sea shipping logistics companies in Singapore, operating in over 100 countries. They want to change their current manual excel chaos into a automated solution for internal forecast and operation. They have been experiencing thousands human error in the current manual process. They hope to have a solution to help them have better number forecast. I worked with my team in India to define the scope before proceeding to the development stage.
Clients' current Excel data is primarily sourced from their Logistics Management System (LMS), a vast database encompassing all sea shipping activities. The operations team retrieves data from the LMS and manually uploads it to Excel sheets, using the reports to guide their activities. This entire process, including data mining, typically takes more than 1 days sometimes. Such long operation process caused business decision and communication were not able to facilitate on time and resulted into significant loss due to some manual error and delays.
The biggest challenge for the design is to transform the current huge Excel datasets into a completely new and intuitive layout. Coming out from the industry, I need to understand the relationship of data and uncover the meaning behind the tables. This journey is crucial in establishing clear hierarchy for the interface and ensuring the visualization provides better operation in the future.
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"I think we should have done this long time ago. Too many manual works and I don't even have time to have some business discussion."
Their major frustration lies in the manual mistakes and time-consuming data mining across the platforms. The key pain points can be listed down as the major three parts as below:
The goal of the solution is to empower users by giving them more time for making business decisions and having meaningful conversations based on data. Additionally, the tool should minimize the impact of inaccurate forecasts. The key directions:
So it's time to get into some details of the direction with my stakeholder. I made a high-level information architecture to give them an overview about what they will see from the design. The key difference for the positions will be depends on their user view in country or port. On the other hand, I deliberately separate the "forecast" as one section to increase it's hierarchy as it has been requested numerous times of importance during my interviews with users (Definitely something really important!). On the other hand, I also noticed there are some requests from the client is out of the scope (not included from their existing files, mark in red). I informed to my management about my findings and suggestions to ensure the deliverables should be within the scope.
Below screens are the concept of art we submitted to the stakeholders. I extended the brand color and use curvy line to represent their business as "sea shipping logistics."
My time allocation for this project is only until Research and Define Stage. However, this project gives me a lot of opportunities to engage with engineering teams to understand about data. I learn how to interpret client needs when the discrepancies of the project met. Design is crucial to translate what they "needs" rather than what they "want." Clients are happy with the define and research as it provide them a chance for an open communication.