Sainsbury's has not only customer facing apps and a website but also over 60 colleague facing apps that help with everything from planning store layouts to ensuring that the right amount of bread is baked each morning.
I was hired at Sainsbury's to help transition the business from a prehistoric set of online/offline processes for onboarding new products into their ecosystem as well as working on re-imagining the Product Lifecycle from the ground up, to serve future needs and utilise modern advancements in product data management. The as-is system was very clunky and difficult to use, with colleagues needing to learn more than 5 different systems, and taking around 6 months to be considered fully trained at doing so!
There were some key users of the product systems whom I interviewed and worked closely with to develop the new platform. I spent many hours watching them use the current systems and noting the areas of most difficulty. There were so many areas to optimise the user journey and these were all documented when it came to building the first feature of the new system, the Pricing System.
To truly understand the as-is system, I needed to map the connections between all the current systems and how product information flows through them.
At a high level, I conducted a huge amount of research into the as-is processes, the users of the current systems and their needs and the current advancements in product data tools. This resulted in the development of a new all-in-one web app for handling product data within the business. The new system is extremely intuitive, with next to no training required which has resulted in huge time savings across the business when it comes to training new colleagues. It also reduced input error by approximately 30%.
