A multi-billion dollar retailer offered customers a completely custom product ordering process for one of their key product lines. The ordering process was very time-consuming and manual. After completing the time-consuming design, the associate enter the designed product into the order entry system to determine the price. At this stage, the customer would often leave due to sticker shock. The retailer needed a way to make the price evident throughout the design process. Additionally, the manual process could not give the customer a clear picture of the end product to be built. Improving was hired to design a solution that would address these key pain points while upgrading the system to modern technologies. A vivid visual solution was created that not only eliminated the guess work for associates, but also engaged the customer.

Industry

Retail

Our Solution

A leading retailer offers its customers a broad range of products, including a fully custom product design service for one of its product lines. The existing design process involved using an order entry system developed over a fifteen years earlier. Although the system had served them well, processing more than a billion dollars in orders over the years, it was based on a Microsoft Visual FoxPro technology stack that had reached end-of-life. Associates were required to manually calculate some of the product dimensions and input them into the system, which caused a manual, slow, and error-prone ordering process. These errors often resulted in expensive re-work and material loss due to miscalculations.

Improving worked closely with a large group of key stakeholders to gain an in-depth understanding of the system needs. The team worked performed an on-site store evaluation to better understand the current process experience and learn how to improve the associate’s day-to-day process. Improving identified an opportunity to create a feature rich and highly visual solution that not only eliminated the guess work for associates, but also engaged the customer and put them control of the pricing model. The system was implemented using an agile software development method. The customer especially enjoyed having the opportunity not only to see a demonstration of progress every two weeks, but to have hands-on access to the work in progress.

The result was an kiosk-style, immersive design tool that gave the associate the ability to visualize the designs for the customer as changes were made to the order, reducing the barrier to purchase. As part of the immersive experience, the associates and customers create an extremely realistic model of the product they are designing in real time. Improving went to great lengths to photograph every product component to create a high resolution preview that the customer can see as they are designing the product. The solution allowed the associates to focus on selling, not measuring and calculations resulting in a quicker turn-around time and satisfaction for the customer.