Problem
Users were using Elementum to monitor supply chain elements - shipments, orders, inventory items - however the user adoption wasn't sticky or consistent. Leadership was looking for a way to provide the value that would support user needs more consistently and holistically throughout their supply chain challenges and remediations
User Needs
Users used Elementum to monitor and track supply chain objects. For example, if there was a concern about a shipment being late, they could log into Elementum to confirm the status of the shipment but they would remediate the problem outside of the product. We saw an opportunity to manage the remediation lifecycle more holistically within the product by introducing rules to proactively notify users of potential disruptions and incidents to collaborate with their counterparts around problems through remediation.
Personas
Administrator
Admins were responsible for creating rules when triggered, would notify and generate alerts to assigned users.
Operator
Operators received alerts for potential problems and could create incidents to bring collaborators together around a problem.
Team Lead
Team Leads viewed could escalate, reassign and monitor their teams performance around an incident.
Design Principles
Make it Relevant
The surface area of supply chains span multiple functional domains - sourcing, logistics, manufacturing and inventory - and the complex organizations within each domain. For each supply chain domain, my objective was to find a common ground around actions and user archetypes. The purpose was to define an information architecture that could accelerate development without compromising the user experience.
Force Accountability
To support the various supply chain personas using the platform, we wanted to design a set of workspaces that were customized to their scope of ownership. We knew we couldn't design a custom workspace for each persona due to development resources and timelines but my hypothesis was that we could work off of persona archetypes. In other words, groups of personas need very similar things and therefore workspaces could be designed for persona archetypes.
Collaborate Effectively
There were three outcomes we optimized for around speed: speed of user adoption, speed of user workflow and speed of development.
Design Concepts
Orchestration Processes
There are 1000's of operators, leads and analysts that work together to help supply chains operate smoothly. Untangling who is responsible for what problems and providing visibility into impacted partners and operators downstream was a gap that Elementum helped close.
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Orchestration processes provided a way for supply chain companies to connect potential and real problems to people. The processes offered a logical way to map problem types to teams and individuals.
Alerts and Incidents
Leveraging Incident Management industry standards, an orchestration process would trigger alerts and notify relevant users about potential problems in their area of responsibility. Once confirmed, alerts could be upgraded to incidents and incident owners could add both necessary and interested collaborators to assist with remediation.
Performance
Part of what makes companies great is how they learn and adapt to mistakes. We wanted to provide a way for businesses to evaluate their performance as well as the performance of their partners to understand where incidents occur and why. The Incidents Dashboard provided an easy way for businesses to improve and work towards specific operational goals.
Impact
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Revenue and Customers - new lighthouse customers and early adopters attributed to almost 9% of our ARR
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Product Market Fit / Usage - usage monitoring transitioned from MAU / WAU to DAU
Reflections
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Activating a System of Record - Visibility is a vitamin, Incidents is a medicine. Being a system of record for mission critical customer data made Elementum necessary. Owning the transaction was critical to our product adoption.
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​Be an Owner - The initial information architecture could not have foreseen the different domain use cases that would test its limits. Each domain designer and team was responsible for pressure testing and augmenting the information architecture. A unified platform is more than a design system - it requires an operational system to uphold the culture of unified design.