I had the opportunity to work on a Supply Chain project taking on several roles: including Tech Research, Product Design and customer facing activities including webinars and workshops. Internally, it was a collaboration with a large team of experts and developers across several departments and countries, to build a product that addresses one of the more complex problems in enterprise business today. The rollout of this product increased company revenue by ~33% in 9 months.

The past three years have been a struggle for many tech companies to source the materials they need to go about their own business.

These shortages mean that these companies themselves aren’t able to supply enough products to their own customers - that is why these days we are seeing shortages in electronic gadgets, automobiles and several other product categories.

The objective is to build a solution that helps deal with, and ideally mitigate supply chain problems for high tech companies.

Through my experience working with high tech companies, I have learned that high tech supply chains are inherently complex, and fragile. It is a messy process of trying to identify if and when you are running out of the ingredients you need to run your own kitchen, and which of these ingredients may be hard to get, and/or may need longer wait times to ship after you order them.

With companies I have personally interacted with, their supply chains are especially dispersed globally, which means that natural and political events occurring globally play a huge role in the availability of needed raw materials.

Having met with and interviewed experts and practitioners of supply chain management, and closely working with them to identify their supply issues and how they may approach solving them, I have learned that in the high tech world, normal economics of supply and demand don’t apply, which means that you may not be able to get the materials you need even if you are willing to pay a higher price - you will have to wait your turn until it is available for you.

Research and business analysis lasted a whole year, which is a relatively large initial investment to develop a product, where I performed the following activities:

• Directly engaging and meeting with Supply Chain Managers (end-users) to learn about their activities, and their own vision of how to make things better.
• Helped organize and conduct webinars and workshops to engage with several customers at once, and enable them to interact with each other, which usually leads to finding interesting commonalities between different companies.
• Design and iterate prototypes that demonstrate solution ideas, to help stimulate a more productive conversation with the target audience.
• Internally, I managed the process establishing intelligence gathering activities, including news gathering, case studies and success stories.

Based on extensive research, the following key business pain points were concluded:

1. The biggest issue of supply chain management is missing out on important news or announcements
2. There is always lack of visibility, because most companies deal with thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of different kinds of materials they need to keep track of.
3. Not all shortages are equal - some may be more severe and devastating than others, so it is important to tell the small and the critical issues apart.
4. Tech companies supply chains are global.

Working closely with industry experts and key customers, I made the following design choices to address all of the user requirements and pain points that have been summarized above.

Users of this product will be tracking tens of thousands of materials from hundreds of vendors worldwide, and they will need to absorb information efficiently and in a short amount of time:

• Focus on visual and interactive information that give a high level status via data visualization
• Present global entities and events on a world map to help detect certain global patterns
• Highlight urgent issues and red flags

Additionally, support for smaller screens was important, to enable users to keep track of their work during travel and events.

Certain events can give users an early clue on upcoming contingencies. With that in mind, I focused on enabling the user to sort their news feed based on different criteria such as availability and pricing, or the severity of each event with respect to that particular user.

Since the intended user of this product will be dealing with a lot of data, and a lot of uncertainty, it is important to display commonalities and trends in different areas of their supply chain. Future projects are also an important part of the product, to allow users to anticipate shortages months in advance.

To keep track of their progress and collaborate effectively within their company, the product provided a simple workflow that enables users to set reminders, put statuses and action items, and track progress of activities pertaining to the handling of certain supply chain events.

The conception, design and implementation of a supply chain solution is a complex project that requires tight collaboration between designers, developers, data engineers and domain experts.

The commercial success of the product itself required post-release activities, Here are some of the of roles that I have adopted:

Working closely with team leads on a weekly ongoing basis to allocate resources, and ensure project timelines are met. Interfacing with customers, providing demos and collecting critical feedback for upcoming product improvements Training sales representatives and working with marketing and content authors to help create marketing and web content