Symptom:
Constrained Growth

Changing the UI took 3 years off employee onboarding time!

The Situation:

Our founder, James Brooks, was asked to look with fresh eyes at a team that couldn’t grow fast enough to meet the rapidly increasing demand for their service. The team manager had been pushed to find new ways of working but was adamant that the way the work was being done was the only possible way. The company was willing to hire as many new employees as needed. Still, the manager’s sentiment was that rookies were not useful - they needed 3 to 4 years of experience before they were helpful.

The team’s job was to organize and classify millions of lines of their clients’ invoice data so that the clients could see their supply chain spending and, therefore, take action to improve their supply chain.

Diagnosing with a Deep Dive:

James started working with the team and dove in deep. He sat beside team members as they did their job, observing their work and asking questions about their actions and decisions. He even helped the team do the work during a very busy period.

James concluded that one problem stemmed out of the inadequate user interface of the tool being used for the work of “familying”. “Familying” refers to grouping together different supplier names from invoices that actually refer to the same company, for example, “Acme Valve Co” and “Acme Valve Co, Inc”. The available interface listed all supplier names in alphabetical order so certain duplications, like the example just given, could easily be found and “familied” together, however, if Acme Valve Company was a subsidiary of G.E. Water, which is a subsidiary of General Electric, that supplier family would be showing in the “G” section of the list, not visible to the user who is now in the “A” section. The user would have to know from experience that Acme Value is a G.E. subsidiary. It was this knowledge of supplier relationships that took 3 to 4 years to build up in an employee’s head!

“Familying” was the easiest part of the job, yet it required years of expertise to become proficient at it. This was why the rookies were not considered useful and consequently why the team wasn’t able to grow as fast as needed. Leaders on the team had habituated themselves to this situation, so they didn’t see it as the source of a problem, only “the way the work is”. It took an outsider with fresh eyes and the willingness to challenge “the way is it”.

Fortunately James had a development team at his disposal for this effort, so once realized, this problem could be remedied.

A Suitable Tool:

James designed a new tool to be used for “familying”. The first phase of the tool was an automated approach. Each new supplier name was “cleaned” following a configurable list of regular expression (RegEx) transformations. In this way common abbreviations could be changed to the original word, punctuation could be removed, one client even had the habit of adding the phone number to the end of their supplier names and this could be removed. The auto-familier was able to find homes for the majority of new supplier names that appeared even though the matching logic was intentionally kept conservative to avoid false positives.

New supplier names that the auto-familier could not place were presented to users in a new interface. This interface was designed to be as fast as possible since a client’s data might have thousands of supplier names to get through. The tool would run a search on the new supplier name, finding the best matches from within the newly created Master Supplier List, regardless of if they were stand-alone suppliers, or subsidiaries of other companies, and present these choices to the user. The user could then use their judgment whether the supplier name should be familed into any of these choices, or considered a new company.

As the team started using this new user interface, they had feedback which was rapidly incorporated into the design of the tool. One request was an indicator of how large the spend was - team members knew they should spend longer getting a million-dollar supplier right than a $100 supplier, so they needed some indication of spend.

The Outcome:

With this new interface, a rookie employee could start “familying” their first day on the job and perform it well. No longer did they need to have a map of suppliers and subsidiaries in their head - the database was in a more efficient place - out of a human brain and into a server. With the rookies now immediately useful, the team was able to hire and scale up, satisfying the increased demand.

The time required for familying immediately dropped from 25% of the entire effort to 10%.

This was one of several process improvements James worked on with the team. At the same time, a Scrum coach was helping this team transform into four agile teams which was a transformative switch in ownership and management of the work. New ways of working, teamed with new tools allowed for real growth. The gross margin for this service rose from 66.5% to 80.5% while revenue more than doubled from $6.4M to $14.4M.

Take-Aways:

The root cause of a problem is not always understood and fresh eyes can see problems the team members have come to accept as facts of life long ago.
Employees who have been doing the work the same way for 10+ years and may have originally established the processes, are the last ones to be able to see the benefits of a new way. More junior employees tend to be more open-minded about new approaches. In this case, the team lead was the very last person to come around, but once he did, he was a true convert - he eagerly asked James “What can we improve next?”
Soliciting feedback from the team is critical, but not every request should be provided - had James acted as a simple “order-taker” for the team’s suggestions, they would have wound up re-creating essentially the original tool as that’s what people were familiar with.

< Back