You’re in charge of your company’s supply chain management. How can you ensure that it’s user-friendly?

1 Understand your users

Before you choose or implement any SCM software, you need to understand who your users are and what they expect from your supply chain. Your users may include your internal staff, your suppliers, your distributors, your retailers, and your end customers. Each of them may have different requirements, preferences, and pain points. For example, your staff may need easy access to inventory data, your suppliers may need clear communication and collaboration, your distributors may need accurate delivery and tracking information, your retailers may need flexible pricing and promotions, and your customers may need fast and reliable service. You can use surveys, interviews, feedback forms, or analytics to gather insights from your users and identify their needs and expectations.

2 Choose a suitable platform

Once you have a clear understanding of your users, you need to choose a platform that can support your SCM software and provide a user-friendly experience. There are different types of platforms available, such as cloud-based, on-premise, or hybrid. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, depending on your budget, security, scalability, and integration needs. For example, cloud-based platforms may offer lower upfront costs, higher flexibility, and easier updates, but they may also pose some risks in terms of data privacy, reliability, and compliance. On-premise platforms may offer more control, security, and customization, but they may also require more maintenance, hardware, and resources. Hybrid platforms may offer a balance between the two, but they may also create some complexity and inconsistency. You need to weigh the pros and cons of each platform and select the one that best suits your business goals and user needs.

3 Design a user-friendly interface

Creating a user-friendly interface for your SCM software is an essential part of ensuring user-friendliness. To ensure a user-friendly interface, it should be easy to navigate, understand, and use, as well as have a clear layout, consistent elements, intuitive features, and helpful feedback. Additionally, the interface should be responsive and adaptable to different devices, browsers, and users. When designing a user-friendly interface, some best practices include using simple and familiar language and icons, using color and typography to highlight important information and actions, utilizing breadcrumbs and buttons to guide users through the workflow, having search filters and sorting capabilities to help users find what they need, visualizing data with charts and graphs, providing tooltips and confirmations with pop-ups and notifications, collecting user input with forms and validations, showing user feedback with loading indicators and progress bars, utilizing responsive design to fit different screen sizes and orientations, and including accessibility features for users with disabilities or special needs.

4 Test and improve your software

Finally, you need to test and improve your software regularly to ensure that it is user-friendly and functional. Testing is the process of checking your software for errors, bugs, and glitches that may affect its performance, usability, and security. You can use different methods and tools to test your software, such as unit testing, integration testing, system testing, user acceptance testing, or automated testing. Testing can help you identify and fix any issues that may cause frustration, confusion, or dissatisfaction among your users. Improving is the process of enhancing your software based on user feedback, data analysis, and market trends. You can use different sources and channels to collect and analyze user feedback, such as surveys, reviews, ratings, comments, or social media. You can also use different metrics and indicators to measure and evaluate your software performance, such as user satisfaction, retention, engagement, conversion, or loyalty. Improving can help you add new features, optimize existing features, or remove unnecessary features that may improve your user experience and value proposition.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?