Sustain
PROJECT 2019
BACKGROUND
Leverage sustainable supply chain to help create a world where there are “ZERO emissions, ZERO waste, and ZERO inequality”
Sustain is Enterprise Sustainability Management as a Service, aiming to help enterprises create and execute sustainability strategies integrated into their business processes. The app’s long-term vision was to turn nonsustainability professionals into successful sustainability advocates in an organization.
Environmental, social, and ethical performance – or sustainability – is an essential factor for smart businesses today, and the supply chain is the biggest lever for impact. Due to the size and complexity of global supply chains, they can have one of the largest impacts on a company’s sustainability. Members of the United Nations (UN) Global Compact rank supply chain practices as the biggest challenge to improving sustainability performance. If suppliers and contractors are not performing sustainably, the companies that do business with them are exposed to serious risks.
SAP Ariba Supplier Management team took the initiative to identify the opportunities and crafted a first-year product strategy for Sustain and the supply chain sustainability solutions. I was part of the ambitious project to design new products and experiences for SAP toward its vision of creating a world where there are “ZERO emissions, ZERO waste, and ZERO inequality” and leading the emerging paradigm of Enterprise Sustainability Management.
THE CHALLENGE
Enable enterprises to multiply their positive impact on social and environmental responsibility by managing supply chain
The opportunity for SAP Ariba was obvious: we could leverage procurement and supplier chain data to inform the actions customers could take to avoid reputation risks related to sustainability. Our ambitions were to create a strong foundation that embraces evolving business needs for sustainability and more diverse user bases.
Our high-level goals were to:
Foster a sustainability mentality for every enterprise employee.
Build strategy tools to help advance enterprise sustainability.
Create a platform for innovation and deeper engagement for business sustainability.
MY ROLE
I led the design of supply chain sustainability management user experience from discovery and concept to final delivery.
I was fortunate to work with a dedicated and hardworking team in this project:
Peter Wohlsen (Senior Product Manager, Sustainability & Incubation)
Ruchi Aswal (Director, Product Management, SAP Business Network)
Kathryn Mock (User researcher, SAP Ariba Supplier Management)
Ronghui Yu (Engineer lead, SAP Business Network)
Vijaya Sarathi Pedda Vukkalam (Senior software developer, SAP Business Network)
DISCOVERY
Curiosity revealed an opportunity to empower every enterprise team and employee to take initiative to support enterprise sustainability transformation
Initially, it’s agnostic what business roles we were designing for. The product team assumed that we focus on sustainability professionals. In order to understand the contexts deeper and build scenarios for our target users, I did extensive secondary research on the common roles with sustainability responsibilities in organizations, and work with our user researcher to conduct customer interviews focusing on understanding their current situations and workflows of managing sustainability.
We found that organizational structures for sustainability management vary and mostly complicated and immature. In the ideal future, companies with an emerging role - Chief Sustainability Officer, would have a central department for creating overarching sustainability strategies. The current situations are similar that companies are craving for advanced strategies to deal with fragmented sustainability issues. Another insight we found was that the problem of achieving sustainability goals is less about lacking sustainability awareness, but lacking knowledge and tools to start the journey.
Ideal future org structure with CSO (Chief Sustainability Officer)
We aimed to come up with solutions that could scale for multiple scenarios of strategic sustainability efforts. Curiosity revealed an opportunity to empower every enterprise employee to take initiative to support enterprise sustainability transformation. This was the beginning of a working north star.
We synthesized the potential users our design needs to cover into these 4 types
EARLY INSIGHTS
Lack of tools to define and execute sustainability strategies
Setting appropriate goals for sustainability in specific business domains and coming up with effective strategies were challenging.
Strategy execution with project management tools and success measurement
Universal business sustainability education is needed in organizations
REFRAMING THE PROBLEMS
An inclusive design that facilitates purposeful supplier development with measurable outcomes to advance supply chain sustainability.
At SAP Ariba, we’ve seen with many of our customers that most users in enterprise procurement and supply chain management have become risk managers, especially dealing with supplier risks, including sustainability-related issues both known and unknown. They manage multi-projects on risk assessment and auditing, and most projects are urgent and reactive. And these assessments and auditing normally take a long time to complete and often come with review cycles. To advance supply chain sustainability, customers need:
Adopt strategies to engage their suppliers with purposes from expectation setting, risk assessment, supplier development, and partnerships.
Successfully execute supplier development strategy
I synthesized the learning from our discovery into a journey map that visualizes a broad spectrum of user problems before diving into the granular details at each stage. This map gave stakeholders a better sense of where they were at in their minds regarding the product strategy.
I reframed the key user problems identified to jumpstart creativity with my team. Four key design challenges emerged:
How might we help users easily get started initiating the sustainability work that would contribute to the company's sustainability goals？
How might we streamline the process of defining the supplier programs with the least amount of user input?
How might we make collaboration and communication between customer and a supplier easier?
How might we help users keep the momentum in this long journey of sustainability transformation?
PRODUCT STRATEGY ALIGNMENT
What we should /shouldn‘t do
Interface - Sustainability manager for everybody
Do
Focus on managing sustainability goals, opportunities, and reports.
Bridge the gap between strategy definition and execution.
Encourage learning and growth.
Don't
Build workspace and tools from scratch.
cause cognitive overload.
Intelligence - a business sustainability exemplar and coach, personal project manager, supporting goal setting and success measurement
Do
Provide sustainability strategy starters to get users quickly started and set them up for success.
Motivate users to keep challenging themselves and developing skills to make more impact.
Don't
Set the level of challenges too high and unattainable at the front.
THE SOLUTION
Introducing Sustain
Sustain is helping companies that are committed to climate, racial and social justice issues, take the lead in fighting for a more sustainable future. Whether you are sustainability manager in charge of multiple sustainability initiatives, or you are employees with little sustainability knowledge want to explore opportunities to make positive impact within your reach, Sustain can help jumpstart your journey.
All designs done by me including IA, interaction and final visuals.
01
Web app 1.0 made easy-to-use for teams and individuals
Here’s everyone’s one stop shop for managing sustainability goals, initiatives, projects and reports. Beyond work management tools, the app delivers personalized content of modern enterprise sustainability knowledge and practices for employees to get educated on the subject.
Choose a challenge to jumpstart your sustainability journey
We made it easy for users to form new habit of choosing a sustainability journey to get the most out of their daily work. And we lay out the processes and streamline them into flow to guide users’ actions.
Sustainability journey starter selection
User flow of creating a supplier development journey
Return Home with clarity
Home was designed with 3 main purposes:
Make users feel more connected to the product and see the real impact from their actions
Give users quickest accesses to their challenge workspaces.
Deliver recommended articles about sustainability related to the user’s work to keep user up to date about the domain.
Keep being motivated and level up your skills to make more impact
We created Challenges page where users can see the active challenges they are taking and the badges they earned from the challenges they completed. To create deeper user engagement and make the experience sticky, we categorize the badges with focus on personal development and impact. A daily motivational quote is also displayed to encourage a growth mindset.
02
Powerful tools to support supply chain management professionals on the biggest challenge to improve sustainability performance
Supply chain management team should determine which of their sustainability goals suppliers can most actively contribute to or directly affect. Transparency, open communication and clear expectations are key to managing supply chain sustainability goals and to collecting and reporting sustainability metrics.
Know where your supply chain sustainability stands
Reporting on Sustainability in the Supply Chain was missing and very challenging to weight multiple contributing factors, now supply chain management team has a standardized sustainability measurement shared across teams, which made it easier for smart goal setting.
Create goal awareness in workspace
Now users can have a dashboard at workspace level which was one of the most desired features among end users. Workspace was design focusing on helping users easily organize projects, conversations, tasks and etc, however, users were missing the outcomes and got disconnected to the goals they set or even without realizing it. Adding Goals & KPIs to the workspace allows users to view and navigate their work from various perspectives and measure their goals.
Engage in consistent supplier audits with new data communication tool
Canvas is a working document including all the details of a project. The scenario of collaborating with supplier on sustainability development involves lots of data communication on performance metrics. Now user can add data points using our new embed data communication tool with ease.
03
Perfecting the holistic experience beyond desktop and existing technology
Considering this as part of enterprise employee experience that SAP is envisioning, we must explore the opportunities of mobile experience design as early as possible. There’s also a strong case for enabling intelligent enterprise experience with conversational AI technology which is already researched and developed within SAP and to advance supply chain sustainability to deliver net-new value gains, it’s inevitable that our product experience is going to evolve with the enhancement from that effort. So I created the communication frameworks that explained key aspects of Sustain’s mobile design and intelligent experience design strategy to stakeholders.
Check messages from workspaces anywhere
Checking tons of comments and messages from multiple stakeholders in different sections, projects and workspaces, was a big pain point. Zooming out to look at this experience in a user’s day at work, users would be more likely to spend their fragmented time during the day between big chunks of work. So we designed the mobile experience focusing on making the viewing and replying smooth and least confusing, and intended to drive increase in mobile app usage.
Intelligent strategy workflow
We tried to help users figure out what suppliers they select to develop. In order for the system to do better job at recommending suppliers to the user, we need to prompt user to use our Goal product as well, so that we could utilize the data to design the algorithm that betters supplier matching.
OUTCOMES
Positive results and much more to do
Sustain MVP was first released to limited customers and the end user feedbacks we got were very positive. Highlighting the metrics that meant success to us:
52 customers showed interest in adopting Sustain within one month of release
70% user satisfaction on overall product experience
75% enterprise employees we survey are excited about using Sustain and would recommend it to their companies
The vision work continues evolving as we learn and adapt to more sustainability use cases for customers and end users. There were moments when I had to trust my intuition and share the artefacts as fast as I could.
While the team had been banging their heads against the wall with a complex, “brute force” solution, Ruyao produced a workable, elegant, beautiful solution that articulated the core experience. This concept continues to provide a north star to the product teams at SAP Ariba today.
- Jason Kirst, UX Manager at SAP Ariba
