Successful Supplier Integrations Increased 3x and were completed 78% faster
My Role & Responsibilities
I was the designer embedded with a small of engineers, a few representatives from the Supplier Support team, an Operations partner and Product Owner. I worked with Supplier Support to drive research, collaborated with the engineers for ideas and feasibility. I created all the flows and final designs.
Context & Problem
Supplier Integrations were taking weeks to months and required multiple service agents to support the suppliers during that time.
Output of the questionnaire had to manually entered across 23 separate backend systems, taking time and injecting human error.
The Work
- Supplier Interviews for qualitative data
- Collaborate with Operations and Supplier Support
- Wireframes and Workflows
- Testing and Validation
- Visual Design and Screens
Outcome & Results
Manual Integrations increased 3x and were completed 78% faster. Supplier Support resources were freed up to focus on more complex integration types.
Data from the new flow automatically populated backend systems.
The Problem
The original focus for this work was making API and EDI integrations easier. Research changed our direction.
Over 80% of the suppliers that integrate with Wayfair are “Manual” suppliers. These suppliers were being forced through a complex process intended for API and EDI integrations that bogged down Supplier Support.
Supplier Support also had to manually translate the output of the questionnaire manually across 23 separate backend systems.
The Work
I began by working with Supplier Support to identify suppliers that had recently completed the integration flow and scheduled research interviews with them.
Through these conversations with Supplier Support, the team learned 80% of the suppliers would eventually be classified and “manual” suppliers – meaning they would use the Supplier Portal to manage manage orders, inventory, and shipping and not complicated API or EDI integrations. This meant we could focus on the manual suppliers for the greatest affect.
Starting with Self Selection
We added a screen to the flow that would allow our suppliers to self-select their set-up. Suppliers that self-selected Basic would be set up as manual suppliers. Those that self-selected Advanced would go through the previous Questionnaire experience.
Automating the Setup
By eliminating the Profiling Questionnaire and allowing suppliers to self select, we focused the questions on items that would add the correct data and settings to the system. This eliminated Wayfair Administrators having to manually enter data and configure backend systems.
Visual Design and Screens
The the visual design in Supplier Setup was one of the many fragmented design areas in Wayfair. The technology stack was also outdated to the point we could not leverage Wayfair’s standard design language. I created a compromise that would bridge the gap between the multiple visual design iterations across systems a supplier would would see. This was addressed in a later Supplier Onboarding project.
Outcome & Results
After launch successful setups increased over 3 times the number of the prior experience. The amount of time a supplier took to complete the step and become active dropped 78% from 40 hours to 9.
The success of the design also removed the need for Wayfair Administrators to perform any actions for manual suppliers and allowed them to focus on API and EDI integrations, increasing velocity on those integrations as well.
- Increased quarterly integration volume 3x
- Reduced integration time for manual suppliers by 78%
- Reduced associate hours to support integrations by 80 hours per week
- Replaced manual data entry with automated data flow into the appropriate backend systems.
Hindsight & Reflections
Making API and EDI integrations “easier” would have been extremely complex and time consuming. It also would have had very little impact, we didn’t know that when we started.
Without research we would have solved completely the wrong problem and failed as a team. By doing the research and having the whole team think critically about the outcome – let suppliers start selling faster – lead us to an better, easier, faster, and more effective solution.