Situation
The growth of one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the world was driving the need for a more efficient and scalable way to leverage the powerful features of their Master Data Management (MDM) system. The company utilized an internally developed tool to support the input and management of Product Information, Location Information, and Vendor Information. The storage of this information directly supports data flow and business processes across 14 other systems, including:
- Visual Merchandising
- PMMS (Inventory)
- Ecommerce sites
- Pricing
- Distribution/Logistics
While the MDM application is feature-rich, the user experience, specifically around the Administrative/set-up functions, is cumbersome and requires extensive training and experience to execute. As a result, Business Analysts in the customer’s IT department spend a lot of time enabling the current business need to build and maintain attributes, templates, and catalogs. Even with extensive training, the current user experience would most likely impact user adoption and causes any new users to eventually look outside of MDM to manage their data.
The technology organization asked for assistance to support growth by improving the user experience of the Administrative MDM features.
Solution
To meet the above goals, Business Forward addressed the needs of current MDM users as well as potential future MDM users. The BusinessForward team created:
- Current and Target Screen Flow Diagrams with mapped opportunities and countermeasures
- Functional specifications document for the screens involved in the attribute and template process (including wireframes)
- Functional specifications document for new screens to support MDM admin visibility through searching and reporting (including wireframes)
Results
Feasible, impactful, and detailed recommendations were produced in the form of system designs that, Support efficiencies as measured by reduced time spent on Administrative/set-up functions. Teams can now use the MDM system without a lot of training as measured by number of MDM users and low training costs. The reduction in tribal knowledge has occurred, as measured by migration of functions and usage by other internal teams.