Industrial / Retail
B2B & B2C
E-commerce
Digital Transformation Strategy
Process Management
CX/UX Design
Over years of servicing the commercial market for HVAC sheet metal customers and a sudden window of opportunity, the parent company of Avenue Air Depot commissioned a pilot project to resolve constraints to growth and operational efficiency.
Avenue Air Depot was formed to service a new and existing market while restructuring internal processes to create workflow efficiencies and meet growing demand. The parent company expressed interest the pilot project to capitalize on process automation and growth opportunities. As a by-product of this endeavour, the business would be one of the first in the sheet metal industry to modernize the ordering process for customers.
At the height of the global pandemic, the parent company restructured as a result of re-evaluating its sustainability amidst growing technological changes. Their shift to eliminating administrative roles put more strain on existing workloads and ability and keep up with overwhelming order volumes.
Constraints on the parent company’s ability to grow is linked to the lack of awareness of the products they carry, labour-intensive workflows, and inefficient ordering processes.
The goals of opening Avenue Air Depot were to leverage new processes, systems, and technology to support business operations and improve customer experience.
The parent company discussed plans to test Avenue Air Depot to see if automating some processes would save time, allow them to scale, and tap into a new underserved market. At the same time, the shortage of steel created by the pandemic, soaring prices, and the parent company’s large market share of supply not being sufficiently accessed created a window of opportunity to get into the market while demand was at an all-time high.
“Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
- Bill Gates
Given the short window of opportunity to get into the market at the right time, I had to determine the businesses’ immediate goals in terms of cost of delay. At the most basic level, the project requirements included:
The underlying question we had to consider when determining the scope of the project was what are the minimum requirements necessary to launch a test pilot that meets the business needs and that customers will find worthwhile?
After mapping out the core workflows of the parent company’s made to order process, I started to identify all the inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement. I started to assess how to adapt this process online with the existing and predicted customer base.
To make purchasing online worthwhile for customers, the process should be easily learnable, usable, and designed in a way that would not significantly disrupt customers’ current buying process.
Through testing, I discovered how customers preferred the experience to closely imitate the experience of ordering from a parts catalog. This design pattern would allow customers to place orders of various quantities for selected variations of a parent product on the same page, allowing to make selections less tedious.
As a distributor for several HVAC brands, consolidating product information from different vendors and creating a standard classification system was especially challenging. Since many vendors had their own way of presenting product information, including different naming conventions and categorizing products, I had to find a system that made sense collectively in a way most understood in the industry.
Some customers still like to call in to check on their orders and submit their own engineering sheets because they either know what to order, want to draw it out, or are sending drawings from a job site.
One of the main reasons for this test pilot was to evaluate whether it is possible to make the made-to-order process more efficient and go paperless. We wanted to avoid misinterpretation, slow invoicing periods, and make submitting orders easier for customers by allowing them to fill out pre-filled forms.
With tight resource and time constraints we had to take a lean approach and avoid overcomplicating the scope by not implementing features until deemed critical.
I developed a framework to ensure the scope remained focused and to avoid project delays. I further ranked the features according to implementation time, financial and opportunity cost, value to business, customer impact, and effort/complexity to implement.
With the ranked list of requirements, I segmented features by releases in the short, medium, and long term to better align the scope of work in order of priority.
Selecting the most appropriate systems and software that would meet our requirements now and anticipate future growth needs was tricky without established and tested workflows. We had to decide between settling for a more short-term tactical plan to seize a market opportunity or selecting proper systems that are suited to the predicted and current workflows. While the off the shelf solutions provided us with more speed and simplicity, it was inflexible for our needs and increased the amount of manual effort in other areas.
Through this project we discovered how some processes were not productive to automate considering the negligible value gained or the sheer complexity of automating a manual process.
For instance, we learned it would be too complicated to allow customers to transact custom orders online from a system integration and accounting perspective. Instead of investing into complex software solutions for an avenue that only comprises 10% of the business, I explored workarounds to simplify processes while still addressing the business' pain points.
Attempting to service a B2B and B2C customer base proved challenging given the different buying journeys for each persona. While retail customers benefit from being able to transact quickly, B2B buyers are more deliberate and tend to place higher volume orders. As an online store, we had to compare the value gained from receiving payment at point of purchase to the high transaction fees we would be losing on each sale.
Testing a new business avenue can provide tremendous opportunities as well as unforeseen repercussions. Undergoing a digital transformation requires a great deal of coordination with stakeholders, a clear objective/ vision, a culture that supports new changes, and oftentimes a great deal of investment. While custom solutions may offer better outcomes, they are not always feasible—especially without a firm understanding of roles, processes, and core business functions.
“If a company isn’t continuously improving then it is slowly dying.”
- Dave Waters
