Summary

By improving interaction and visual design, I allowed warehouses to combine similar work tasks, leading to gains in efficiency and employee job satisfaction.

For a large home improvement retailer’s supply chain business unit, I was part of a team that made improvements to how warehouses allocate work. Based on previously completed user research, we knew that an ongoing problem was inefficient work allocation and poor warehouse associate job satisfaction because each replenishment task was generated individually due to existing system and U.I. limitations.

We created a new workflow to allow ‘replen[ishment] waves’ to be batched together such that associates could efficiently navigate the warehouse, completing batches of work in a similar area and/or of similar type, rather than returning to their starting point over and over to pick up new work tasks.

The below dashboard designed in Figma shows how work could be planned by a supervisor based on number of units in an order pool, the age of the work, its status within the overall warehouse workflow, and so forth.

Supervisors could also modify each batch of work at the production flow and unit level, to precisely control how much work was allocated for each wave.

The result was a 3% improvement in warehouse efficiency (for this particular type of work) which may seem small, but translated into millions of dollars saved per warehouse per year. Employee satisfaction also increased by about 10 basis points.