Make in-season inventory management as efficient and effective as possible for Zalando’s planners and suppliers so that Zalando can increase its product availability and profitability.
For improving the efficiency of in-seasonal inventory management, it was decided to redesign the legacy software, which was in use by Category Managers, since we have defined it as the weakest point of the process.
— Workshop with Stakeholders for discovering business goals;
— Team workshop for documenting assumptions, statements, and measurements;
— Shadowing sessions with 12 users for mapping their current tasks and processes;
— Legacy tools IA and UI analysis for discovering its weak points;
— User tickets analysis for extracting the statistic of pain points type and frequency;
— Interview+Survey with 34 users from different teams for discovering the differences in their processes and priorities.
— Mapping the user pain points to the process flow;
— Mapping the user pain points to the IA of the legacy tool;
— Workshop with our team and users for defining and prioritizing possible solutions;
— Workshop with stakeholders for estimating solutions and defining the release strategy;
— Documenting all learning and definitions.
— Planning wireframe visual structure for defining the optimal user path and amount of screens;
— Writing main user stories for user testing validation;
— Covering each story with mockups;
— Organising mockups into a prototype.
— Testing the prototype with the team;
— Organising testing session with ten users;
— Collecting and processing user feedback;
— Improving the prototype and coming back to users.
— Finalising High-Fidelity Mockups and prototype;
— Synchronising the UI styles with Zalando's global UI system;
— Passing the visuals to development;
— Supporting the implementation;
— Visual and experience QA;
— Preparing the onboarding strategy and documentation for users.
— The new Inventory Centre was successfully launched;
— All Category Management teams were successfully onboarded;
— The results after the first release was measured and analyzed;
— All learnings were documented for the next release.
Launching of the new Inventory Centre has dramatically increased product availability for Zalando's customers, increased profits for Zalando, and automated many of the tedious tasks for Category Managers, which has led to a rising user satisfaction rate. Now Inventory Centre is providing one integrated solution for all in-season management needs. It optimally manages in-season inventories, from placing reorders to initiating supplier returns.