The pipeline-fill process for supply-chain readiness in global new-product launches was being primarily managed by Materials Managers using SAP transactions fed with demand-forecast data by Product Managers. In theory, the data would rarely change; in reality, new market insights and demands from leadership and the market organizations impacted the quantity estimates frequently, especially the closer the project got to the launch date. This caused frequent and massive rework by the MMs, who had to wrangle data from Excel sheets and into SAP.

The goals of the improvement project were to reduce rework and data-wrangling in time-consuming and error-prone SAP transactions, as well as to enable collaborative data management between the global/regional/local MMs and the global/regional/local PMs, compared to the then-current state, which was fraught with miscommunication, overwork, frustration, and transactional “throwing over the fence”.

To achieve these goals, I put together a self-organizing project team that would develop and own a layer of user-friendly, digital collaboration between all hands-on stakeholders in the process. In this setup, I acted as an Agile Product Owner, Requirements Engineer, Software Architect, and UX/UI designer.

Based on input from the Central Europe and North America marketing regions and logistics hubs, over a period of 4 months we developed, matured and got Global Logistics sign-off on the requirements, the concept and the UX/UI of a new web UI for collaborative pipeline-fill data management to a state ready for contract implementation with external software-development partners.