📦 Automating Inbound and Putaway Processes
Product Design
Systems Thinking
Process Design
In the world of rapidly growing e-commerce start-ups, a quick turnaround time for delivery has always been the name of the game. However, in this case study, I’ll be showing how we improved the very first steps of successful fulfillment: inbounding of stocks.
In the world of rapidly growing e-commerce start-ups, a quick turnaround time for delivery has always been the name of the game. However, in this case study, I’ll be showing how we improved the very first steps of successful fulfillment: inbounding of stocks.
Client
BeautyMnl
Duration
1 month Nov-Dec 2020
My Role
For this project, I was UX/UI Designer. I worked with 3  developers and 3 employees from the warehouse Inbound and Put-away Team under the Operations Department.
Scope of Work
Stakeholder Interviews
UX Research
UI Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
01 What problem were you trying to solve? Why?
For a while, Inbound and Put-away processes are conducted and tracked manually with the use of stacks of printed paper and Google Sheets that increased chances of human error-related discrepancies.

Apart from manual processes, steps like counting become redundant because of the inefficient delegation of activities under Inbound and Put-away stages.
Objectives
Make the overall process of receiving stocks and put-away more efficient and accurate

Optimize the warehouse team's workflow by reducing delivery to saleability time gap

Lessen discrepancies in picking and packing

Accurately measure individual and team performance in the warehouse
Technical Constraints
Optimizing for Mobile Web View. The feature is designed for a mobile device for portability in performing warehouse tasks. This is accompanied by a handheld barcode scanner.

Limited Testing. Limited testing was conducted post-deployment of the project due to imposition of lockdown & quarantine rules and limited access to warehouse staff.
02 What steps did you take?
Stakeholder Interviews
Since this is an internal process, our main stakeholders are the Operations Department, specifically those who are under the Inbound and Putaway team.

In several stakeholder interviews we facilitated, we identified the main problems they were encountering with the current process, some of which are:

1. Receiving stocks from Merchants/Couriers is recorded manually.
2. Counting of stocks, identifying reasons for rejected stocks is also conducted manually.
3. Multiple quality assurance checks are conducted in different stages of the process.
4. Counting of stocks is repeated during Put-away.
🏆 Success Indicator
Same Day Put-away Rate

Percentage of stocks that are delivered and put away on the same day. This also determines what percentage of stocks suffer opportunity costs due to not being put-away.
🏆 Success Indicator
Staff Processing Rate

Number of items processed per shift. This helps asses the efficiency of each staff member and counts as one of their main KPIs.
Identifying the user
The main users of the feature we designed are the warehouse staff assigned to Inbound and Putaway.

These staff vary from day-to-day because of assigned shifts. They can also be replaced when some resign or warehouse teams are rotated.

With this in mind we had to design the features in a straightforward step-by-step and screen-after-screen manner, that will not require much cognitive effort on the users end.
Setting up the feature specifications and designing the mockups
After our several process improvement meetings with the operations team, the developers who worked on the project (Jaye Hernandez, Ciana Lim, Kit Avendaño) devised a Feature Specifications sheet which became the primary reference for wireframing and mockups creation.
01 DELIVERY CHECK IN
How might we accurately track incoming deliveries of stocks?
A designated staff member from the Inbound team will scan the barcode on the Delivery Request Form. After which, the staff will have to indicate whether the delivery is made by the merchants themselves or made via courier.
02 QUALTITY ASSURANCE CHECK
How might we efficiently conduct quality assurance during inbound and putaway?
In the previous process, quality assurance checks were conducted by the Putaway team instead of the Inbound Team. This meant that the Inbound/Receiving team includes broken or damaged stocks in their initial count, and sorting and recounting of damage stocks happens much later.
03 STICKERS AND BINS
How might we ensure 
accuracy of tracking stock locations in the warehouse?
After counting and quality assurvance checking, staff members segregates stocks of several SKUs into bins. Consequently, they attach pre-printed stickers to bins which will later help in tracking stock movement.
04 PUTAWAY
How might we eliminate inefficiencies in the putaway stage?
By removing redundant steps in the process (QA and recording total saleable stock counts) and strategically reordering existing necessary steps previous stages, the final putaway stage is minimized to just scanning a bin location in the warehouse and putting away bin assigned to that location.
03 What were the results of the project?
↑ 90%
Same Day Putaway Rate
Prior to the release of this project, an average of only 32.27% of stocks was put away the same day they were delivered, which means that the remaining 67.73% of stocks delivered experienced opportunity loss.

With the implementation of the new process, which significantly reduced the number of steps, 61.21% of items were put away the same day they were delivered.
↑ 72.9%
Staff Processing Rate
Based off of the average headcount of the inbound and putaway staff, we also computed that each person, is able to process only 133 pieces per shift, or 16 pieces per hour.

However, with the features in place, this has increased to 230 pieces processed per shift, or 29 pieces per hour, per person.
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03 What did you learn from this project?
💡 Learning
Testing early with users whenever feasible.

Despite the impressive impact of the project, something we could have done better was if we tested with the warehouse staff to address additional pain points they could've had. However, due to the time constraints and the restrictions set in place during quarantine, we couldn't have tested the product in a real world enviroment as the staff conducts their activities.
💡 Learning
In designing internal tools, function precedes form but both are important.

Reducing the cognitive load for each stage of the process was necessary in building the feature. The goal was to make it as simple enough that anyone in the warehouse could use it.
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💡 Learning
Having a clearly laid out flow of the existing process helped identify the pain points.

Understanding the internal process was crucial in being able to improve the newly deployed one. What helped drastically was the visual representation of the flow and existing constraints. It was then easier to identify what process improvements to make.
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