User research for orders and inventory planning

Company
Turvo Inc.
Industry
Supply chain and logistics
My role
Sr. Director of User Experience
Employment duration
2.3 years (2021 - 2023)
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TL;DR

Led the research scope, planning and facilitation.

7 qualitative subject matter experts interviewed with 7 hours of transcribed data, 53 customers surveyed. 1.5 weeks from plan to analysis and presentation.

The research outcome helped product management and engineering teams to prioritize their roadmap resulting in 500K savings in one quarter.

Early user feedback supported building the right feature.

Context

The end users
Logistics planners, inventory managers, and specialists, warehouse personnel.
The customer goal
Reduce costly overcharges, time taken for item nesting planning and execution, accuracy in the case and pallet count in LTL shipping, and have track and traceability at both high and granular levels.
The business goal
Provide workflow improvements within the warehouse. Build a feature that offers a competitive advantage.
The product hypothesis
There was an opportunity to enhance shipping unit representation within Turvo’s product for ease of planning less-than-load (LTL) and small parcel delivery.
UX research goal
Validate the hypothesis, identify pain points, user goals, and use cases, and recommend outcomes in order of priority.

The opportunity and outcome

Turvo had subject matters expertise (SME) within their sales engineering, product and marketing teams that could quickly validate our hypothesis. This ensured research was planned and delivered in less than a week.
Results:
The nested items feature was prioritized based on SME feedback and a controlled  customer survey. This saved Turvo 500k in product planning and development in 2023. The released featured received strong reviews from Freightwaves, the freight journal. The UI received 95% satisfaction rate as compared to legacy products from SAP and Oracle.

My role and responsibility

Hands-on leadership that included:
Complete research planning and moderation; research analysis and presentation. The researcher on my team supported scheduling and transcription and survey responses.