Ogun / Visualizing the Supply Change Management for Construction

Web Dashboard Integration, Market Research, and Use Cases Process

In this opportunity, I would like to share with a project in which I collaborated, requested by a Startup that launched to the market a management software destined to the construction sector in Spain by software engineers and Construction Domain Experts, called Ogun.

Ogun is a Startup Digitalising Construction that places for construction companies to manage projects with ease and for suppliers to manage orders. They based their platform by Gantt chart to manage all your project details. Also, the product added communication and organization tools and made it easy for suppliers to showcase their products.

It is important to highlight that this productive sector, however important it may be at the economic level for that country, even as a global production engine, is one of the least technically developed in the operational management of its supplies, in comparison with banking or pharmaceutics.

The problematic exposed before the equipment with which I worked, was based on the following hypothesis:

“Constructors depend on the materials from the suppliers to get building …

We believe that visualizing the Supply Chain in the project planning, will drive them to better communication, fewer delays and minimizing over costs.”

Design Process

Discover

The most interesting thing about this assignment was that we did not have any knowledge about the sector and much less about the supply chain in all its context. This required spending a great part of our time for research.

The first thing that was done was to contact the founders of the Startup to get to know first-hand the current state of the startup, the number of current customers, presence in other countries and most importantly, know details about the experience of its users using the product.

In parallel, we analyze different content and documents related to the process of acquisition of materials and human resources management in the construction sector and other sectors that require a fairly robust system in supply chain issues.

With the support of the technical team of Ogun, the bases were created to start the interview processes and the surveys, marking the following questions:

1. What is the supply chain?
2. What are the players in the supply chain for the construction industry?
3. How to improve your supply chain.
4. General Supplier sourcing. (Systems Design).
5. Job site management. (Better communication and planning cohesion).
6. New product rollouts. (Better product knowledge).
7. How do they manage the timing of the delivery of supplies?
8. What needs to be tracked and monitored (invoices, delivery time/production time).
9. What kind of information is important when it comes to the ordering of supplies.
10. When construction companies are sourcing suppliers what are the things they should consider?
11. How are you coming up with solutions to the problems present in the supply chain?
12. Do you have workarounds for when are you delayed?
13. How does the procurement phase affect deliveries?
14. Do they know each point of contact between send-off of the goods and arrival of the goods?
15. What kind of details are in order status?
16. How do they track changes in orders?

By mastering technical terminologies and being able to understand the great process of the supply chain, it was possible to determine that each productive sector handles different work methodologies to achieve the efficiency of its processes.

It was possible to determine that the construction sector is one of the most complexes, mainly due to the little development that exists in terms of automated management through management software in medium or small scale budget projects, due to the high cost of this type of tech tool.

On the other hand, different moments could be identified where it was ideal to direct the user’s research, which had not yet been possible to specify due to the complexity of the communicative processes between:

• Departments linked to the supply chain
• Type of supplier (Contractor or Sub Contractor)
• Origin of the required products (National or International)
• Technical parameters that were required to comply with the quality
• Standards and guarantees within the safety of the works
• Administration and correct placement of supplies in warehouses
• Classification of said supplies according to their use

The results obtained from the interviews allowed us to build an affinity diagram that helped us to segment the problem statement as the correct selection of the user persona.

Finding Problem Statements

Finding User PERSONAS

Creating Use Cases and User Flows

Define

We were able to identify the following Problem Statements:

Project Managers need a way to manage the shipment of goods so that they can avoid delays.

Project Managers and Suppliers need a way to centralize information in order to manage shipments efficiently.

Suppliers need a way to update the advancements of goods in production, so that project managers stay well informed.

Also, we created the following Personas:

Prototype

Due to customer requirements, it was decided to work under the same UI that Ogun currently presents in its Dashboard and on this we develop certain qualitative analyzes in terms of color balance, branding and information architecture.

In order to identify solutions, we initiated the first sketches that responded to user flow pre-established in the supply chain management systems of the previously analyzed and researched projects, taking into account the satisfaction of its users when interacting with their software.

Crazy 8

Paper Prototype / Frist tests and Iterations

After doing the first phase of testing we were able to determine that the project plan and the supply chain of the work had to be visualized simultaneously, being this point what allowed us to move towards the prototyping in MID-FID:

a. Supply Chain

As presented in the images, within each line of work that integrated the general plan, icons were added with the letter D, with the idea of identifying the moments where the supplies requested would arrive at the work or the warehouse. But when performing new tests it was determined that the user did not associate these icons with the supply chain, so it was not easy to identify the phase in which that supply was.

Four phases were created to determine the status that each supply would have based on its production status and delivery to work.

b. Purchased Order:

Both the project manager and the roles that had access to the project plan, needed to view in detail the purchase order to decide how to interact or modify any point of the supply chain with property and in real-time, so a popup was created to the right of the dashboard that would allow identifying all that information.

That popup was created by the same UI Style Tile implemented on the left side of the dashboard, because based on the pasted testing the user requested consistency in the new content added.

HI-FID Prototype Invision

Conclusions

It is evident that in order to provide satisfactory and efficient user experience, there must be an exhaustive investigation, where we try to reduce the margin of error to the lowest point.

It is important to listen, especially the dissatisfaction of the users since this will be the motor of development and creation of future solutions.

The testing is a construction phase that can not be taken lightly, because no matter how much you know how to sell a product or service, with the passing of time all results will come to light and it is better to have the type of result expected than having lost valuable creative time without guarantees.

Learning in UX is something that requires emotion and being open to ignorance, not being afraid of not having all the answers and, on the contrary, being humble at this point and becoming as receptive as possible during this research phase.