User experience improving employee productivity by 88%, a process improvement case study with Fonterra

?In my last blog, I covered the benefit of engaging users through the development lifecycle of application development.?In this blog, I’ll cover a case study that I was involved with last year.

This was successfully delivered and provided some amazing results.?The true heroes in the story are the Fonterra GIS team since they developed a UX strategy and delivered a result that now has the users saving up to 10.6 hours a week.?Let me detail the steps of this case study so hopefully you can assist engage your customers/employees and improve their daily process.?

The information provided in the blog was developed by the Fonterra team.?Who is Fonterra you ask? Here is a list of facts in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Fonterra product statistics

Fonterra is a cooperative and supports both Australian and New Zealand farmers.?One of the challenges Fonterra was facing was that most of their users were still accessing SAP through traditional SAP GUI screens that were very functional, unfortunately, not that easy to use.

The Fonterra GIS team recognised that they needed to improve the experience, have empathy for their employees.?Fonterra GIS Chief Architect Simon Cowley placed Jeremy Wee in charge of a global UX Fonterra GIS initiative.?Jeremy worked closely with us as we identified key reasons why Fonterra GIS should provide a new user experience (Figure 2).

Figure 2: How an improved UX can improve employee loyalty and engagement

The next step was to identify a persona and a use case that would assist a large majority of users.?We presented several global collaboration use cases, the use case identified that provided the maximum productivity return was in the warehouse.??The following key issues were identified:

·?????Manual PI sheet entries

·?????Poor data quality

·?????Time consuming data entry

·?????Manual Transactions?

?Collaboratively SAP and Fonterra GIS scheduled a call with Andrew Longwill and he was keen to explore how we could improve the process order management (POM) engagement with his employees.??A POM user accesses SAP to create products such as butter or yogurt.?

?A POM user had to enter 11 separate transactions that were not seamlessly connected.?Most of these users do not have an IT background and require training and support in order to complete their job.??The Fonterra GIS team had developed a process for delivering UX projects (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The Fonterra application design process

?The next steps involved organising design thinking workshops with the end users, understand how they would like to engage with the application.?Three key personas were identified, Product Operator, Supervisor and Team Leader.

This lead to several workshops with all three types of users. These workshops were quite robust, the users were very opinionated and very vocal.?They challenged each statement and demanded simpler approaches.?The Innovation Business Solutions team, again under the supervision of Naresh Shinde captured the job requests and identified the key actions users need to perform.?On the Fonterra side, Jeremy Wee and Dean Capp were instrumental in coordinating the team and resources and making sure the project was delivered.?

Once delivered, a pilot was run, the following statistics were identified (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Initial POM pilot results

The initial result was very impressive since the new Fiori POM application reduced errors by implementing validation.?There was a significant time improvement in entering data as well since the application utilises simplified UI5 controls.

Figure 5: The extended results of POM from Cobden and Dennington plants.

Once again, the results were impressive saving users 10.6 hours a day.?This justifies the initial statements on why user experience is important, users find it easier to use, less errors and no need for training.?The Fonterra team were kind enough to create a reference video that explains how the application was used (Video 1).

Video 1: Customer testimonial of the solution

There is a huge list of people that were involved and apologies in advance if you are not listed, this really was a huge team effort and the key was having transparent communications between SAP and Fonterra.?

On the SAP side, Oliver Betz provided the support and executive sponsorship for this project and Shane Blood, Adrian Griffin, Panthee Sangavi and Adrienn Deli for their local engagement and executive support.?My manager at the time Stefan Hoberger and Christian Hoffmann who flew over several times to assist with this engagement.?A huge thanks to our global delivery team Naresh Shinde, Neelabh Telang,?Chirag Chauhan and Vivek Vishal for their professional engagement and development on the Fiori POM application.

?On the Fonterra side, Gerben Otter, Simon Cowley, Nigel Adler, Andrew Longwill and operationally Jeremy Wee and Dean Capp for executing the project.??

If you believe you have an interesting use case you’d like to explore, please feel free to contact me or your local account representative and I look forward to partnering with you on a successful UX engagement.