Supplier One Discovery
One platform for all the Supplier’s daily tasks
Project Overview
My Role
I worked as the lead UX designer overseeing all projects, making sure the experiences were consistent. I built learning materials based on discovery work and gave presentations evangelizing our work and it’s importance to Walmart. I was point person for connecting with other product teams outside of Supplier and brought up opportunities to cross collaborate.
The Project
I was focused on the end to end Supplier One experience. Suppliers had to jump from platform to platform constantly to get their daily tasks completed. Supplier One consolidates those platforms into one place. It was a completely new platform that we built from the ground up.
The Challenges
Had to learn quickly about the supplier space, while being mindful of deadlines
Starting from scratch, no existing Supplier One mock ups or page layouts
Small team of designers (3-5), and limited access to researchers and content designers
Working alongside other enterprise teams creating B2B focused patterns, since our existing pattern library is in progress and geared towards customer facing applications.
The Process
Supplier Discovery
What is a supplier?
Personas
Supplier ID mapping
End to End Journey Map
Generative User Interviews
Storyboarding
Sample journey and how it affects the end customer
The business opportunities and Walmart’s goals
The core customer emotion driving us towards those goals from a supplier lens
Supplier One Projects
Where We Are Today
How are we measuring success?
What’s next?
How I supported the team as a lead and principal designer
Patterns and guidelines
I worked cross functionally across multiple teams to find overlaps in projects and set design pattern best practices while in flux waiting for a fully baked design system.
Educational presentations
When doing discovery work, I created presentations to educate new team members and resources for our stakeholders to show to outside teams building into our ecosystem.
Advanced prototyping
I created and maintained prototypes that connected every page that would go live as a communication resource for suppliers to learn the new features and capabilities.
Mentoring
I supported our designers through regular one on ones and helped them develop their skills to grow their careers.
Created a platform from scratch
I directly worked on and oversaw designers on every work stream on Supplier One. I served as a consultant for outside teams building pages into our platform.
The project
Today, suppliers use a platform called Retail Link that serves as a link farm with over 100 applications. Suppliers have to jump from application to application several times a day to get their daily tasks completed.
What if suppliers had one place that they could complete all their daily tasks? That was our goal for the Supplier One platform.
For the first year we focused on eight high impact applications. As time went on we continued to incorporate more applications including Daily Demand & Inventory, On Time In Full, Supplier Quality Excellence Program, Aspen, APDP, APIS, Supplier Scorecard, and more!
From these eight examples you can see their look and feel were completely different from one another. Our job was to integrate these application’s functionality with a unified look/feel with consistent patterns. But we didn’t limit ourselves to how these apps worked today; we looked at the end to end experience, seeing how we could connect these separate workflows and add in new functionality to elevate the user experience. Plus we incorporated workflows like co-op creation that were entirely offline actions through email and phone calls.
Part of building a new platform meant defining design guidelines and patterns. While we had an existing pattern library it was primarily focused on B2C experiences/needs and not for complex tables, charts/graphs, and forms. It was up to us to define and create templates for reuse among ourselves and other teams building into our platform. Because we were a small scrappy team with limited bandwidth, I consulted and guided teams outside my org on how to follow our patterns and best integrate into the Supplier One platform.
First we did discovery work, building personas and learning about the business structure.
What is a 1P Supplier?
1P (first party) suppliers refer to manufacturers or vendors that sell their products directly to retailers like Walmart. These suppliers typically have an established relationship with the retailer and offer a wide range of products that are sold under the retailer’s brand.
Building personas
Through out the process, we conducted supplier interviews and chronicled their pain points, positive points
These provided a valuable resource for feature ideation, discussion with business, and created empathy for what our suppliers go through. We continually interviewed suppliers on a monthly basis even after launch.
But to start, we focused on DSV Generative User Interviews
During our discovery process our researcher conducted some generative user interviews. We received plenty of feedback all across the user journey so we knew there was plenty of opportunity to improve the their experience!
Mapping the capabilities
It was important to map out the business structure of the personas to understand what they would need to see on a page and platform level.
Supplier ID Discovery
Suppliers use different Supplier IDs to differentiate the different parts of their business. Suppliers need to filter down to specific Supplier IDs for their different workflows so they are looking at the correct set of data. I needed to understand the ID structure to make informed decisions on filtering and page structure.
Agreement Numbers are 9-digit numbers created at the Supplier Agreement or Contract level. Agreement numbers are 9-digit numbers that are made of the 6-digit Supplier number, the 2-digit department number the agreement is for, and a sequence number.
Supplier Number, also used interchangeably with the terms Partner Number and Vendor Number, represents the 6-digit number that identifies a supplier at the company or Supplier Profile level.
The next two numbers identify the contract department like clothing or produce.
The last digit of your 9-digit Agreement Number designates a sequence.
A new sequence is generated when there is a need to differentiate the business that is occurring under a single department.
The sequence number is used to designate a unique contract, and/or it may be used to designate unique banner or specialty group (e.g. Walmart, Walmart.com, Sam’s or Sam’s.com).
Plus there are two more IDs that are assigned during onboarding.
They refer to identifying the Supplier across markets (domestic & internationally.)
Mapping out the hierarchy
In practice, this is how the IDs map out on a hierarchy within a company. This is a simplified version as there are hundreds of IDs across these large corporations.
Journey Mapping
After learning about what suppliers were and how their business functioned, we mapped out their end to end journey as it functioned today across all the different platforms they visited.
However sometimes it’s hard to conceptualize those pain points and the user journey.
To illustrate the potential benefit of Supplier One, I storyboarded a sample flow showing all the touch points, and how it affects the end customer.
Highlighting the core emotion of our customers helped contextualize the importance of Suppliers and how it relates to Walmart’s business goals.
How are we building towards Walmart’s goals?
What is the emotional core driving the goals of our experience?
Customers come to Walmart for Supplier’s products & services
but they stay because of the trust we ensure them through the following qualities:
How are we achieving our business revenue goals?
Where are we today?
With our small design team and limited resources, we’ve been able to launch our pilot to a select group of DSVs and officially launched Supplier One on Feb 22 2024 to all US domestic suppliers .
We’ve delivered projects across the user journey with the ones our team owned completely in blue, the ones we consulted and oversaw in yellow, and the red on backlog for us to pick up.
Adoption continues to increase.
As we roll out more releases we will continue to evangelize how Suppliers are a core part of the Walmart ecosystem and how Supplier One is improving their day to day workflows and increasing customer loyalty. Part of our strategy includes:
Ramp up Item360 Marketing to move suppliers over organically
Release new features exclusively in Supplier One
Targeted outreach to suppliers who have not logged in
How are we measuring success?
Our main indicator of how well we are doing is measured through Supplier feedback that is collected via ASUS.
We’ve seen consistent growth among our omni (owned) suppliers, surpassing our previous cohort of users (the avg ASUS score being shown by the dotted line) who were our early adopters, but we’re seeing lagging growth among our DSV suppliers.
Diving deeper into the “why”
We’ve been making progress in some areas. Site performance issues decreased by 19%, and usability issues decreased by 13%.
But we were seeing increased issues in the areas of Item (7% increase), Support (4% increase), and DSV Orders (4% increase).
For support, you can view this project to view our response to how we helped these users. But part of of their input was around a lack of support around Luminate and some unusual ticket types that were handled primarily through email, so I provided a quick link button to Luminate support in the chat bot and provided specific flows for handling tickets that get sent as emails to a Walmart associate.
And for DSV orders, they needed cost information (not just item price), which I quickly implemented based on their feedback.
Overall, we are constantly looking at ASUS feedback on a regular basis and determining our roadmap and prioritizations based on these scores and direct user feedback.
What’s next?
Most of what we’ve built has been shifting existing workflows into Supplier One, while enhancing the interactions and aligning the pages to the new pattern library components.
But we’ve also been strategically finding opportunities to up level the experience like:
Connecting workflows to really unlock the potential of Supplier One (It’s not enough to have everything in one place if the apps don’t talk to each other or aren’t linked.)
Capturing workflows that are offline actions. See my Event Co-ops project.
Integrating inline help strategies and patterns across all the apps. See my Support Ecosystem project.
Bringing greater personalization, allowing for a customizable homepage, and the ability to save different filters and views. Suppliers are not one-size-fits-all. From our interviews we’ve found that they have vastly different needs and work preferences, especially for different categories like apparel vs. food, or size of the company.
Expanding to more markets outside of the U.S. which have different laws and language selections.
And providing marketing pages for different programs for Suppliers to enroll in or learn more about. Serving as a way to advertise across different teams and encourage them to build into our platform.
