Opportunity

This brand is the world’s largest home improvement retailer. With more than 2,200 stores across North America, the company has brand recognition and reach in nearly every city. With so many stores and thousands of employees, the company needed a way to effectively orchestrate the setup and replenishment of the bays (shelves) within each store. One of our consultants was tapped to lead the engagement to elicit, capture and prototype a future-state, technology driven solution to direct all bay-related services. 

Approach

Our consultant and team of designers convened workshops with the client’s merchandise execution team to understand their current way of working, pain points, motivators, and desired future-state. We also executed site visits in several stores to meet personnel responsible for serving bays – to hear day in the life stories and their desires for improvements. In our workshops, we rapidly prototyped a smartphone, future-state concept that would transition activities from paper to digital. We then tested these concepts with personnel in the stores for reactions that led to quick adjustments before declaring the final product complete. We managed this engagement in a fully user-centered manner.

Outcomes

The client took the concepts invented during this engagement and began a multi-year program of transitioning from paper to digital. As one can imagine, this sort of change is not as simple as flipping a switch: there were considerations around acquisition of smartphone hardware, training, development of new electronic business rules and planograms, and much more. The company has concluded this program and today its team of merchandisers enjoy a fully digital approach to bay service.