We’re building that tower.
Primary role: Director Experience Design
Design team: Mike Zacheja, Dartis Willis
Contribution: Resourced project. Reviewed and provided feedback on concepts and final design.
The idea of a supply chain control tower is big. Getting full visibility of all the transactions in your end to end workflows - and using that data for fulfillment and short and long term planning - is a huge undertaking. SCM experts can debate what is required to call something a full-fledged control tower, but in the end you need to start somewhere, with something useful to your customers.
Oracle NetSuite is delivering on that promise, which will grow over time as does data collection. What I mean by that is, you can build it, but it will become more and more useful as the data pours in.
The control tower was one of our first efforts to deliver real value with AI/ML. Centering on predictive risk, we fed a ton of vendor data into the system to get things started. This is about goods being delivered, and the timeliness of the shipment. The screen below is from a demo you can find on YouTube that focuses on a fitness tracker. The system has predicted that a purchase order will be late. The options to correct this could be changing vendors, or just adjusting the date of the PO.
We worked with customers on what kind of information they wanted to see, and tested different ways of presenting it.
Shipped product
Early visual concept
This is a design exploration visualizing the delivery confidence for a particular vendor. The existing NetSuite patterns have many constraints, but as we improve the design system, our visualizations will get better and better. We also want to use natural language to explain the situation, instead of just presenting raw data (ex. “If you switch the PO to BetaTek, you’ll get the trackers in time to fulfill your June sales orders.”). Getting the balance between natural language and easily scannable data will take some extra attention, but we’re committed to delivering actionable insights that make sense.
Data concept
Early wireframe exploration of information that could be useful, like P&L impact, time loss, customer(s) affected. etc.
We are now in the position to significantly modernize the visual designs, but ultimately, like true UX designers, we put priority on the product solution over aesthetics.
This is a medium fidelity mock-up used to explore ideas. While this stayed somewhat true to the legacy NetSuite design patterns, a few new things were introduced to drive conversation. When looking at risk, you obviously want to know if something will be late or not, but knowing the impact of that miss is even more important. Can you predict P&L impact? Should you surface what customers are affected, and maybe if they’re preferred or critical to your business?
Supply chain snapshot
The predicted risk portlet helps with managing your supply chain in the now. But what about planning? Good planning can minimize disruptions down the line by better anticipating future demand and supply.
The supply chain snapshot makes this possible by simulating future supply and demand across your business. By analyzing the inventory impact of current and past due transactions, you can create forecasting simulations to better prepare for the future.
