Assignment of Design Thinking (Visualization)

1. Challenge: The challenge that I would like to describe for this assignment would be of
a problem I worked during my summer internship related to ‘Supply Chain
Optimisation’. In e-commerce space there are multiple legs (Fig 1) of transactions
from source of the product to delivery of the same, during these shifts there is a risk of
losses. So the challenge was to reduce these supply chain leakages and deploy
initiatives to strength the processes.
Figure1

Area
Source Mother Hub Child Hub Segregation Customer
Point

2. Selection: The tool I adopted for solving these problems was predominantly
visualisation and product journey. In my understanding visualisation is a very
powerful tool that gives you a good concrete understanding of various verbal and non-
verbal cues while solving a problem. My rationalise to use this is purely for the
closeness to real work this tool helps in understanding a problem which words can’t
otherwise describe. In fact in my business problem situation I was able to live the
customer and product journey to view things from various point of views enabling me
to ask right questions.

3. Application: In order to solve this problem, I laid out rough schematic sketch of the
process flow of product and identified various stakeholders involved in each of the
stages though various symbols and colour codes. Then to each of the take holders I
assessed the what? how?, why? through various dimensions such as social, emotional,
physical and financial. Further, prioritising and narrowing the drivers to cause of
supply chain leakages.

4. Insight: Basis the application of the tools and analysis of available data I started
forming hypotheses that it could have been a technical or system issues as the data
was misleading. By using visualization I could bring non-verbal and non-
quantifiable aspects such as social, physical and emotional side of delivery executives
in the picture. These sorts of aspects don’t get captured by data. Some of key
observations were that this was more prevalent in the morning shift and- hence the
delivery executives didn’t have enough sleep it resolved in wrong delivery and
missing collection of orders for their area. It was eye opener for me that an
employee’s sleep could have such a significant impact of business. It was finally
corrected by appropriate policy intervention for shift timings and employee welfare
programs.

5. Approach: In a broader scheme of things I would probably revisit this problem

through ethnographic interviews of various stakeholders to under and capture their
points. Further create a mind map of these observation and identify trends and gather
insights from across the system and provide scalable solutions.