OneShield
A platform designed to uphold Global Supply Chain Compliance & Visibility
4,000+ users
#Designstrategy #Platform #Enterprise
My Role
Product Design Lead, Individual Contributor; 2023 - 2025
What I was responsible for;
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Core pillar of the project's 4iTB
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Led end-to-end discovery, research, design execution, feedback gathering, DesignOPs
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Evangalised design to the rest of the 4iTB
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Created concepts that drove product roadmaps until 2027
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Worked closely with Business, Product and engineering to prioritise the project road map based on importance to user
What is it about?
One of the world's largest retailers' main objectives is to ensure that all products are manufactured ethically and safely.
From an organizational standpoint, this is achieved through rigorous audits conducted at every factory from which products are sourced.
OneShield is a key system supporting this mission. Its main objectives are:
Become the organisation's single source for facility information
Provide the Global Supplier Compliance team with comprehensive visibility into facility compliance.
Enable the receipt, review, and assessment of audit reports to ensure all facilities meet ethical sourcing and safety standards.
Why: To increase efficiency, maintain brand reputation, and promote standardisation
“We receive allegations and media articles about practices in the supply chain, and these audits are our way of monitoring, investigating, and addressing higher risks.”
- Head of Specialty Compliance and Ethics
Starting out - initial learnings
At the start of the engagement, Design was brought in as a support capability as development was already underway. Some of the initial learnings are as follows
1. Global Supplier Compliance has a 15 year old legacy application from which they were migrating from
2: The legacy system was being migrated to an in-house workflow builder, which did not fully satisfy user needs
3. The team did not understand the need for a good experiene
As the support activities took up minimal time, my focus was shifted towards establishing the importance of Experience Design
Research
With the available free time, research was conducted to fully understand the ecosystem, users, and their needs, leading to the formulation of actionable opportunity areas.
The following methods were utilized to conduct user research.
Business understanding
A through understanding of the business operations were obtained from the leaders of the business, Establising a good rapport along the way.
User interview
Conducted user interviews to get a detailed understanding of the business process along with an understanding of their current workflow.
Fly on the wall observations
Conducted fly on the wall analysis of how users currently use the system in and get an understanding of their interactions along with a time study.
What was found
The following was identified from the research that was conducted
What was found: Output 1
User archetypes
The following user archetypes were identified as part of the entire ecosystem
Suppliers
Suppliers are the owners of facilities and are responsible for onboarding their facilities and make sure they meet compliance needs
Analysts
Analysts review various types of requests from suppliers and ensure that all the information is gathered to assess a facility’s compliance
Assessors
Assessors assess various audits for a facility and ensure that any red flags pertaining to the organisation's compliance needs are identified
Apart from the 3 primary user archetypes, a few others, such as merchants and audit firms, were considered as secondary users of the tool as they did not need the tool to perform their primary tasks
What was found: Output 2
Current user journey
Please note that the user journey showcased here is just part of the entire scope. Click on the image to see an enlarged version
What was found: Output 3
Opportunity areas
Please note that the user journey showcased here is just part of the entire scope. Click on the image to see an enlarged version
How might we make it easier for the supplier to onboard new facilities and maintain them
How might we ensure that the analyst is not spending time on administrative tasks
How might we make it easier for analysts to review a request
How might we make it easier for assessors to assess a submitted audit
A surprising problem
Assessors lost a signification amount of time due to technical issues such as the internet not responding or because their laptops stopped responding.
Nearly ~20 mins during our observation period
“All this (downtime due to tech) is not counted, holidays are not counted, Saturday Sunday's are not counted”
The solution
The solution was to build a platform that would help the organization to gather and assess audits for the various facilities where it supplies products. The solution also aimed at removing redundancies from a decade's worth of band-aid fixes on the existing solution.
The core tenants utilized while building the application were
1. Platform Mindset
2. Reduce redundancies
3. AI focused approach
The Design
The solution design not only restricted itself to screens but also greatly influenced the system design of the final platform and influenced changes in the current business process
Relooking at the user journey
The user journey was optimized, eliminating redundant processes and automating others, streamlining the actions performed by users. Business stakeholders were able to transform their archaic processes through the visual representations provided through the design prototypes.
Before:
After:
The Solution: Output 2
Meet, Agent Shield
An AI Agent was designed to serve as a core support function across the platform. The core functionalities of the Agent were designed to be
Supplier liason
Support suppliers with their application and any queries through a simple prompy based interface
Request verifier
Preemptively analyse all requests recieved and prepare them for a final review by the analyst team
Assessment assistant
Assess all audits recieved by the team, keeping them ready for final review from the assessment team
The Design concepts were used to convince the Business, Engineering, and Product teams to relook at the product to provide a better experience for the end users
Participatory design
The execution and detailed discovery during the realisation phase was carried out backed by Participatory design. Continuous feedback was received from actual end users on a bi-weekly basis for every small detail.
Prototype testing was also carried out with the end users
Accolades
Tejas Bhat
Senior Director - Global Technology and Innovation
“Your redesign of the OneShield user experience, not just the look and feel, but also the flows, have been well received by the end users. Your innovative and out of the box approaches to improving UX has been instrumental in the success of OneShield so far. I have also appreciated your ability to push back and ask "why" to your stakeholders in a respectful manner - it makes us all better by challenging the status quo. You have been one of the few UX experts I have worked with who don't just accept the requirements as they come from a product manager; instead, you try to get into the shoes of your stakeholders and really dig deep into the rationale, motivation, and impact of what we are trying to build. Thank you for all you've done for us!”
Alan Woodward
Senior Manager, Specialty Compliance and Ethics
“Your understanding of users' needs shines through in your work. You have an innate ability to anticipate topics and design with them in mind. Everything seems so functional and intuitive. Sometimes it can take me a while to catch (as I relate concept to process). I'm your biggest fan”
Ajay Anand
Principal Product Manager, Enterprise Business Solutions
“Keshav has demonstrated exceptional UX skills, coming up with new e2e vision and new UX for OneShield. His design thinking process and designs have been greatly appreciated by business, engineering and product teams. He is a vital asset as we look to build a e2e platform for supplier compliance with OneShield being at the centre of it. He has demonstrated leadership skills and I strongly recommend him for the next level.”
Meow-nu.
