Vendor Operations Management Tool
(2015)
Product Introduction
While working at HCL America, I got the opportunity to work with the largest internet search company in the world for their Vendor Operations Program Management Office. I led the design and creation of a web app for managing the entire lifecycle of their TVC (Temporary, Vendor and Contractor) workforce. I wore multiple hats during the course of the project. I started as a Business Analyst and transitioned into Product Manager and Design Producer for this application. The process of conceptualizing the product, creating process maps and work flows in Lucidcharts, creating mock-ups in Balsamiq and finally creating UX/UI Design in Sketch is shown below. The product followed Lean UX methodology and utilized Material Design Principles.
Please note that in order to respect the NDA with the company, the information below is redacted wherever needed and some items have been eliminated.
Role:
Business Analyst, Product Manager, Design Producer
Scope:
Product Conceptualization, Process Flow, Wireframing, UI Design
Tools:
Lucidchart, Balsamiq, Sketch
USER PERSONAS:
1. Google Managers - These are Googlers who have a specific requirement in their team for vendor resources
2. Vendor Manager at Google - Vendor Manager is the person who coordinates vendor management process and has the final say into who is the bidded vendor company
3. Account Manager of Vendor companies - These are the people who source resources for their company, interview them and present them as contractual resources for further evaluation by Google Manager
PROBLEM:
This product aims to facilitate the Vendor Operations Management team to be able to use only one system for managing and maintaining the entire lifecycle of a TVC engagement right from creating a project for procurement to on-boarding resources for projects.
This tool aims to track the vendor operations for the following modules:
1. Intake
2. Bid Management
3. Sourcing & Selection
4. Fulfillment
5. Onboarding
PAIN-POINTS:
The current vendor management process has the following problems:
1. Lack of a standardized system for TVC procurement
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Different teams follow different process for procurement.
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No standardized SOW, PO, rate card etc are available, leading to confusion
2. Lack of single system and common repository
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Too many systems to interact with during the procurement processes
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Too many data sources to deal with leading to data redundancy and confusion
3. No insight into the current status of procurement process
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No way of tracking a request’s progress in the procurement lifecycle
4. Difficult to pull historical records of past TVCs
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No system for tracking why was the TVC off-boarded and again on-boarded
SOLUTION:
The product met the following business objectives and goals:
1. Ensure adequate information is gathered from Managers to start the TVC intake process
2. Display the status of the intake process to relevant stakeholders
3. Notify relevant stakeholders regarding pending action item on them on a timely basis
4. Provide a means to capture SLA breach for all stakeholders
5. Improve financial consistency and compliance
6. Centralize TVC lifecycle management under VendorOps (Strategic Vendor Management Group within Corporate Engineering)
7. Remove administrative overhead from TVC managers
PROCESS:
We started with user research. Our users were the 15 departments of the organization for who we were building this application. Our users also included vendor partners and our internal Vendor Management Team. Once we had a set of initial As-Is processes in each department, we started brainstorming, To-Be process building and conceptualizing the overall web application. This took us quite a few iterations. But since we were working following agile Methodology and Lean UX principles, the development team started immediately after we had a first set of processes and concept.
Story Boarding and Conceptualization:
First Iteration(Overall concept - White boarding, Brainstorming)
Third Iteration (Individual Process Maps, Data Flow)
Wireframing:
Process Maps:
