Increasing label generation efficiency by 70%

Context

How customer orders are fulfilled

Whenever a customer places an order, a chain of events spring into action. The item desired by the customer is procured and shipped from node to node until it reaches its destination: the customer. Throughout this process, third party carriers help in moving packages.

Context

Labels are the package's DNA

Every package is labeled and this label contains vast amounts of information. All this information is essential to the package reaching the delivery endpoint and also describes how it shall happen along with the delivery timelines. Tracking IDs help in tracking the shipment from node to node and this helps the customer to know where his package is, and when it shall be delivered 

What is the problem and how does it matter?

Challenges of creating labels at a mass scale

Approximately 17.3 million packages are shipped daily. That works out to more than 719,178 orders per hour, and 200 orders per second and an equal amount of labels (or possibly more) are printed every second. With such huge numbers of labels to print, a manual process of label template creation is a massive problem. However, till fairly recently, label templates were manually created.

This process of template creation took from 2-6 months and was extremely inefficient.

Additionally, whenever the company wanted to expand to new regions where it did not have a footprint, (to expand its reach) it needed to collaborate with local carriers to set up its services. This meant creation of new label templates; and till the time that was achieved, business suffered. This meant huge losses till the time all the services and documentation was set up.

Project brief and goals

Project TransEmbark

• Solve the problem of manual creation of labels; make it fast and efficient by at least 50%.

• Solve problem of manual new service creation and adding new logistic parties to company systems.

• Enable systems to be more transparent on service requests instead of relying on email threads and have referencable requests for artifact creation.

• Quicker way to deploy, generate samples and get approvals from senior leadership on requests such as labels.

Scope and possibilities

• Global reach: The problem had a global impact on regions across the world in which it operates; carrier managers who work with external carriers in almost all regions are impacted by this problem.

• A bouquet of services: Labels is only one service. There are several other services which are similar in nature: Manifests, Routing codes, Shipment tracking ID generation and Invoicing. Since the scope was too large, a pilot project with labelling service and consolidated platform for all services was initiated. Since labelling was the biggest and most important use case, it was the first to be taken up.

All services needed to integrate with each other other over the same platform and this led TransEmbark being a multi-year project.

Discovery

The solution seekers

Carrier managers and programmer analysts are the primary and secondary users. During the discovery phase several carrier managers and programmer analysts were interviewed and I documented their process and task flows, roles and responsibilities and pain points. 

Discovery

Artifacts and documents generated

Various artifacts and documents are generated at different points of the entire package flow (such as Labels, manifests, Shiptrack ID's, Routing codes etc.). All these documents and artifacts tie to carrier managers and their external counterparts ie the 3P external carrriers.

Research

Primary research

I formulated a strategy for a comprehensive research plan. Being the sole designer for this project, completing all research activities would be a challenge. I requested my stakeholders for assistance in conducting all research activities such as deep customer interviews, cognitive walkthoughs, card sorts and focus groups. The research protocol was created by me and I was able to conduct these sessions with the help of my colleagues. It was a challenge to convince tech and product to assist and take out time for research and plan and schedule sessions with our users; but eventually the value of the results of the research proved to be decisive reasons for going through the entire process and yielded many undiscovered feature sets and viewpoints of our users.

All this involved a lot of convincing and educating the stakeholders about the value of user research and to make it a priority; prior to writing out the BRD. We met up with legal, business, and procurement teams to understand several legal intricacies and details of the business. Several stakeholder workshops later and several brainstorming sessions later, concluded in a comprehensive requirements document and long term product plan. 

Product strategy

The collaborative discussions, workshops and research led to the foundations of a multi-year product strategy to enable us to build a multi-service, comprehensive, scalable, forward looking product. Since building the product from start to end was a herculean task, it was decided to split the tasks into year level goals, beginning the pilot project with the labeling service and the central platform, which catered as the central hub of all other services which would be integrated into it in the future.

Starting with the customer and working backwards, I created Vision mocks and ideated to provide a holistic and encompassing view of how the different services would combine and perform under one central platform and how our users would use it to complete their daily tasks.

These vision mocks were developed and presented to senior leadership amongst tech, UX and product and were much appreciated. Similar demos were also provided to tech teams so that they could better envision the product and proceed to come up with tech solutions regarding the same.

User archetypes

Programmer analysts

Goals and research insights

Solution

New label creation

I envisioned a drag and drop label designer specially created for PAs which made label designing fast and efficient. In case of complex attributes, users can refer to contextual help to understand details better. Properties panel on the right makes modification of elements simple and easy.

• Navigate to the label designer from the dashboard (based on CR which is pending)

• Drag and drop attributes in the label designer

• Adjust properties of attributes

• Refer to contextual help in case of doubts/queries

Solution

Preview and sample generation

Preview helps users to quickly check if labels will print correctly. Sample generation is required for sharing samples with stakeholders for their approvals.

• Preview label to check for discrepancies

• Adjust and manually input specific attributes to check further

• Publish samples and share with stakeholders for approvals

User archetypes

Carrier managers

Goals and research insights

Solution

Creating a new change request

Checking status of existing requests and New Change requests can be easily created from the dashboard

Solution

Adding a new service

Addition of new logistic parties or new services can also be done via the dashboard

• Navigate to add a new logistic party / service page from Dashboard

• Fill in relevant details of logistic party or service

• Submit request and wait for approvals

Scaling up

User metrics

User feedback

Learnings

• Collaborating with teams enabled enabled me to think differently about research and understand the benefits of conducting the same; this helped me to build a superior product. I was very focussed on what I wanted to conduct research on, and I collaborated with my engineering and product partners to help me conduct the same as we were short on resources. After I explained them the benefits of conducting this research, they were on-board and were very enthusiastic on conducting this collaboratively. I prepared the research plan and the research protocol which made the entire pocess very structured.

• Tech teams started getting involved in such workshops and research which changed their perspective from being tech-centric to user-centric.

• Design thinking became a priority first, to-do task.

• I showcased the UX vision to leadership, and this helped them gain trust in the UX process and faith that we are building products that will be useful to our end users and  which meet business goals (enabled by conducting relevant research).

What could have we done more?

In our many sessions, I had proposed new ideas and directions in which the product could be developed: no label (RFID tag in packaging itself), re-usable label which can be taken off by delivery man and reused by encoding data of a new package and smaller, new format labels that reduce carbon emissions. There were many directions, but current technology being used and our stakeholders (3P carriers) use of technology also influence in which direction we need to go.