The Unified Sales Desk

Supply Chain

An integrated enterprise SaaS tool for sales forecasting and fulfillment

Background

WESCO is a global supply chain company. They help electrical, utilities and communications companies maintain parts inventories. As part of their work WESCO has to forecast the needs of their clients on a yearly basis. This forecast requires the coordination of many departments using a number of non-compatible tools.

The Problem

WESCO was experiencing what they called the “swivel chair” problem.

  • Decreased Efficiency: due to the multiple software packages used for CRM, Quoting, Marketing and Sales
  • Lack of Shared Information: different departments in the company were not able to benefit from possible synergies  
  • Time Crunch: WESCO needed to have a tool ready for sales planning at the start of the Q4 2021 and an initial release in Q1 2022

The Solution

The Unified Sales Desk

The company asked BCG to create the blueprint for a Unified Sales Desk that integrated all the tools they needed to do their work under one consistent experience.

The Process

Initial Concept Demo

After only a week of ramp up, myself and another designer had to create a demo of what the Unified Sales Desk could look like.  This included the following features and user flows:

  • Unified Dashboard
  • Performance Dashboard
  • Lead to Opportunity Flow
  • Pricing, Quoting, Invoicing
  • Various Digital Tools (SPA, Fiber, Market Intelligence)
  • Clickable Demo

Catching up on research

I entered the project with very little context. After the rush to create the demo, I had some down time to understand the company better by catching up on existing research.

  • Attended business process mapping sessions with the client
  • Learned the lead to opportunity sales process
  • Learned the roles of different users (ISR, OSR, GAM, Marketing, Sales Support)

Below is a snapshot of the research done by the entire team on a Miro collaborative board. I attended meetings with the clients and subject matter experts to learn about key parts of the WESCO business. Then I helped the team synthesize those insights into this board. The top two rows are an infographic created by another designer. I contributed to the rest of the mapping below.

Design Principles

While waiting to start new wireframes, I negotiated with my project leader on the best UX activities to do in the meantime. After discussing new wireframes, a site map, a design system or design principles, my project leader agreed that design principles were the right strategic level activity at that point in the project.

My PL wanted to use them as a strategic document to drive alignment with the different teams working on the USD. He wanted the various stakeholders to have a say in the design principles and be committed to them before the product build. That way, he could point back to them as something that the teams agreed on beforehand.

UX Pattern Cards

I created 31 low fidelity wireframes to demonstrate the UX patterns that might be relevant to the Unified Sales Desk. The exercise showed the users the potential tradeoffs implied by prioritizing one pattern over another.

Resulting Principles

  • Guiding – supports and incentivizes users to get work done 
  • Supporting users with the next steps to take so they can keep up the momentum they need to meet their goals
  • Customized – empower users to address the uniqueness of the business to serve customers
  • Customization beyond the individual level of content or user preferences – providing a way to adapt to unique customer needs
  • Collaborative – improves efficiency across the business by sharing and growing institutional knowledge
  • Ensuring users feel connected to each other, across business units, roles and the broader organization – enabling the sharing of best practices by automating communication and data flow

Information Architecture

While waiting for the right moment to make more screens, I also suggested creating a site map to provide some structure to the product. Consultants are very conservative about adding any new type of deliverable to their work and the consultants I was working with were not my normal Digital Ventures colleagues. They didn’t have the same type experience that I did. So while it would have been taken for granted to make a site map with my DV colleagues, I had to educate and persuade my BCG colleagues on the value of creating a site map. Once they saw that the level of effort was low and how seeing the structure of the product could help them think clearly about the implementation of each screen, then they supported my work on the site map and used it as an artifact for discussion with the client.

UI Design

Learning Microsoft Dynamics

Before I joined the project, WESCO had already made the decision to implement the Unified Sales Desk using Microsoft Dynamics. They had an existing contract to purchase dynamics from Microsoft, but the scope of what features to implement in Dynamics had not been defined. Some or all of it could be in Dynamics. Some could be custom built. Now my team had to make a crucial decision: How should the USD be implemented?

Possible Implementation

  • Fully Custom - highest level of effort, most customization
  • Microsoft Dynamics - lowest level of effort, but chained to the MS experience
  • A Hybrid - leverage Dynamics core but build custom features in MS Power Apps

Actions Taken

  • Used a model-driven instance of Dynamics to see how the software worked. 
  • Converted the demo dashboard to the Dynamics UI design 
  • Worked a Power Apps expert to test the feasibility of the hybrid approach.  

Results

The experiment showed that the hybrid approach was feasible, so I switched to using the MS Fluent UI Design System for the USD.

UI Design

Account Planning

The account planning process was a crucial concern for our client. It was coming up in October and that use case needed to be ready ASAP. This was the last key user flow that I created, now in the new Dynamics look and feel.

The Result

Handoff for Implementation

During the handoff, I walked the new designers through the key screens I designed.  I gave them the context and the rationale behind the design decisions. I used Zeplin as a handoff tool.

Lessons Learned

There is no MVP for an Enterprise Product

Not in the traditional sense at least.  Because an enterprise product has to work for many different stakeholders, each who have their own needs and feature, it is challenging to create a thin slice of the product in the way you would for a Mobile App MVP.  The employees work within an ecosystem where roles depend on one another.  Creating a great feature for one persona isn’t useful unless another persona can also use it.