PRICE CHANGES - DICK’S SPORTING GOODS
OVERVIEW
Scan and Activate is the process in which an employee scans thousands of goods in the store each week and marks them with a new price if needed. This is a very old outdated process and also has the highest turnover rate in the store. The employees were working off a spreadsheet and a highlighter. Our goal as a product team is to understand the struggles and the processes inside and out so we can make it more enjoyable and more efficient.
The Problem
We gathered thousands of pieces of feedback and worked many hours in the stores with the employees to truly empathize and understand what was going on. We used all this information to define the broken processes and create a better one. They were taking a long time to complete their tasks and had many struggles along the way.
I am showing some of the design activities I did to gather that information, understand the problems and prioritize what needed to be done. I was the only designer working on this team and leading these efforts along side 1 product manager and a team of engineers. There was a ton of opportunity and we created a solution that improved the process while saving the company money. We received a lot of positive feedback from grateful employees, which in my opinion was the best part.
Output from a Goals/Anti-Goals session held with all stakeholders
Many time studies were conducted to measure the labor savings.
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES
This process was truly a wholistic discovery and framing activity. We had to understand the reporting system from and internal standpoint, which housed thousands points of data that needed to be communicated each week, then deliver that information in a way that any employee could digest.
I used this activity to help my team to identify what we were going to tackle first and what features had the most value.
Time Studies and Feedback
RESULTS AND REFLECTION
We ended up creating a desktop application that allowed the employees to filter and build the report out in a way that saved them time and energy.
Just changing one feature had really great results:
We found that we weren’t providing them with the bay location for shoes. This was adding about 3 steps of item search to find one shoe (x100+ shoes per week)! So we had this information and added it to the report and…
Before:
3min. 23 sec. to find a shoe’s bay location
Avg. # of shoes on footwear week = 100
100 shoes x 3min. 23sec. = 6 hours 3 min
After:
1min. 5 sec. to find a shoe’s bay location
Avg. # of shoes on footwear week = 100
100 shoes x 1min. 5sec. = 2 hours 10 min
Across 756 stores, this will save approximately 48,562 labor hours which is an estimated $631,309 of labor savings per year. Just from adding one column of information on their report.
There has been so much positive feedback from our employees and we have truly made their lives better. They went from a paper spreadsheet to an interactive interface that helps them actually find items.