04. Business Process Mapping
MY ARROW ELECTRONICS
Role: Workshop planning • Client workshop facilitation • Stakeholder interviews • Process mapping • Concept wireframes
London, UK 2018
B2B Commerce
The Challenge
Arrow Electronics specialises in distributing electronic components and materials to individuals and companies small or large. For their business customers they provide a service called MyArrow, this focuses more on B2B (business to business) sales and productivity.
The challenge was to enhance the current set of online tools by bringing the disparate offline processes into the MyArrow platform. However the majority of the sales process took place offline.
Method & Process
The client had a list of new features they wanted to implement however these features needed further investigation. I wanted to understand more about the business and general tasks staff had to undertake. This would give me a better insight into how to create the best digital experience. To do this I created different diagrams that charted current business process relating to the new features, over time with input from the business and customer proxies these diagrams evolved into business process maps.
Using an agile delivery process I began by discovering as much as we could about MyArrow from a customer perspective, this meant task modelling. As B2B users are almost entirely task-driven, this approach made sense and it helped us identify the the steps taken before and after using MyArrow. Once we had an understanding of customer tasks the next step was to start layering on the backstage business processes i.e. considering the actions of Arrow staff that would be required to deliver a service.
To gather this insight into the processes we conducted a series of interviews with subject matter experts from the business such as regional sales managers. The interviews allowed us to expand our understanding of the customer journey from all angles helping us to discover pain points.
During the analysis of the raw interview data the Arrow staff and customer pain points became apparent, we used this information to identify the experience needs.
First draft business process map
Map with outstanding questions
Process map with identified pain points
Process map client workshop
Snapshot of final process map
Learnings
At the end of the discover phase we held a stakeholder workshop to validate our findings and to extract high-level business requirements using a series of collaborative exercises. This was the first time the client could physically see first hand their process and the potential areas for improvement.
After the discover phase we had a better understanding of the features and entered into the define phase. Where I used what we had learned to create future state journeys illustrating the ideal customer experience and conceptual wireframes to start to define how they could be implemented.
Personally I found condensing an offline and online business process into an abstract visual journey really helped articulate to the client what the next steps were.