Sam’s Club Assortment Planning Tool
Translating and enhancing fragmented and outdated merchant workflows into a comprehensive planning experience.
ROLE
Lead Designer
TEAM
1 Principal Designer, 1 Project Manager, 5 Product Owners
TIMEFRAME
5 months
The challenge
Merchants have the ideas and skillset to deliver surprise and delight to Sam’s Club Members through choosing a unique set of items to sell in stores and online, but have little bandwidth for this strategic opportunity planning due to the overwhelming amount of tactical work. Specifically, assortment planning and execution (setting up items in the system) is currently a complicated and inefficient process, using multiple tools and a lot of time-consuming and error-prone data entry and other manual work.
The vision was to enable merchants to truly provide great items for Sam’s Club Members by eliminating steps, streamlining fragmented workflows, and digitizing key processes like buy plans.
The result
One application
We consolidated the multiple fragmented merchant planning tools, including internal products and excel spreadsheets, into a single, robust application and source of truth for merchant planning needs.
7 core views
The application we designed was segmented into a handful of unique views dedicated toward specific parts of the planning process, and designed so that data flowed and remained connected throughout each view.
27 in-app workflows
We incorporated core merchant planning workflows into the application, like allocating items to clubs, so that merchants didn’t have to jump to other external tools.
Research & discovery
Documentation intake
This work stream was already over 2 years in the making by the time our team joined, and had previously experienced two failed product launches that users did not adopt.
The complex history of the work stream created a large backlog of documentation over the years—including user pain points, product roadmaps, process maps, and more—that our product team wanted to leverage to speed up discovery rather than starting from scratch.
Product deep dives
Knowing that past efforts on this product had failed to become adopted, we documented workflows and annotated findings from the previous products to ensure that we would avoid making the same mistakes.
We gathered that with 5 product owners who each owned a part of this experience in an extremely political landscape, previous attempts at the experience were likely very fragmented for users. We also hypothesized that an excess amounts of clicks to drill in and out of various levels was likely too cumbersome to users in an already very complex workflow.
User interviews
Another hypothesis of ours was that previous efforts failed to keep users in the loop, and that hindered adoption. We advocated to conduct broad user interviews across a variety of categories to understand how we could build a product that worked for all users, while using all of the previous documentation to more deeply understand the more granular processes of planning.
These interviews focused heavily on screen-sharing from users so that we contextually understood the information they needed to see in each view.
We translated our findings into a high-level workflow of key parts of the process that was a source of truth for all user types, even though each user operated a little differently.
Documenting the complexity of the landscape
Through our documentation auditing and user research, we gathered a rich understanding of how complex it really is to plan an assortment at a major retailer like Sam’s Club. We illustrated what we found and discussed with our stakeholders throughout discovery debriefs to align on what are the challenges we’ll need to work around.
Weighing all the factors
Merchants essentially operate as a CEO of their own business, a Category, within Sam’s Club. They are responsible for deciding what items are carried and sold in their area, the Assortment, and weigh a multitude of factors to make strategic decisions about what items to carry in each slot in the club—from financial performance, to physical constraints, to vendor relationships, and more.
Planning for 600+ locations
Merchants actually run this business across over 600 Sam’s Club locations, and each club needs a slightly different, unique set of items to curate the perfect member experience, due to different demographics, trends, and available space. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Balancing multiple overlapping seasons
The Assortment planning process is constantly in motion, too, with multiple overlapping “seasons” being planned at once to ensure a constant flow of inventory in clubs. This means that each merchant is constantly in different stages of planning at once, determining what items will be offered, how much, and at which clubs. Doing this also requires pivoting between strategic top-down and executional bottom-up lenses.
Navigating non-linear and ambiguous processes
Planning involves a large amount of complex steps and mini-processes to accomplish, and doesn’t follow a linear path from start to finish. This meant that we needed to design for workflows that aren’t set in stone, and to be flexible enough for merchants to easily “play” around with their Assortment without committing until the later stages of planning.
The current state
Despite the complex nature of such a critical part of Sam’s Club’s business, the reality is that planning occurs today in extremely complex spreadsheets in excel that are manually created by each merchant based on what they have found that they need to know in order to plan their assortment. With these current ways of planning, it’s almost impossible for merchants to even get all of the relevant data that they need to plan in one place where they can make comparisons and run competing scenarios to work out the best plan for their assortment.
Compiling all of this data to work solely in an excel format also means that the data is immediately out-of-date, it’s disconnected from Sam’s Club’s real-time systems where items and club inventory are maintained, and ultimately means that item setup looks a little different from user to user due to manual data entry, affecting the hygiene of the data in their systems.
But by reducing the manual, time-consuming aspects of the experience and bringing these workflows into a seamless, real-time product, we could empower merchants to truly plan uniquely for each Sam’s Club location to increase member satisfaction, and enhance system data hygiene and accuracy at Sam’s Club.
User needs takeaways
A major takeaway from our discovery was that merchant adoption of the tool we designed would ultimately depend on us designing for a lot of different styles of thinking, organizing, and problem solving at different points of the planning process. Each merchant works differently, and we don’t want to standardize that either—but rather to design flexibly enough to empower them to approach planning in the best way for them and their individual business.
Strategic approach
Pivoting between top-down planning where merchants create a high-level strategy, curate a list of items, and map those items to locations, or bottom-up planning where they plan for one club’s specifics and replicate and tweak that strategy for each location.
Major vs minor scales
Planning for a major reset where merchants reconsider their entire assortment to on-the-fly, minor changes where they are replacing an item at a single club.
Scopes and channels
Being able to slice the plan to view their strategy for a specific space allotment, to a location, to a DC, to in-club versus dotcom. Merchants also need changes they make at any level to be mutually updating to the plan as a whole.
Ranges of certainty
Allowing for more gestural planning early on or with prospective draft and consideration items, compared to fine-tuning the plan in the later stages and making small adjustments to items in order to establish them in the system.
Concept design
Initial exploration
We started our concepting by exploring widely, creating two competing concept models to discuss with our product team. The first represented an experience more closely-related to the current state of the various planning documents, including sections for an item plan, an item-club plan, and a space plan. The second introduced a more radical transformation of the planning process that centered around a timeline view of the merchant’s assortment over time.
Our product team chose to stay a little more true to the current state planning documents, but they were very excited about the timeline idea and wanted to introduce it in a supplemental way.
Concept model 1
Concept model 2Mapping out concept views
With a chosen direction, we began layering more detail onto the concept model by documenting the types of core views we gathered that merchants needed to complete an end-to-end assortment planning process. This was reviewed with stakeholders through iteration to gain incremental alignment as a team on the scope and breadth of the application we were designing before diving too deep into one particular area.
These maps included our initial understanding about how item data would need to flow between each view and propagate downstream throughout the planning process. We also mapped out an architecture of the features and capabilities required in each view to align the team on scope moving forward.
Mapping the core views and how they interact
Architecture mapping of functionality within each view
Core concept solutions
Bridging top-down strategy with bottom-up context
Because different merchants take very different approaches to planning, we had to design for flexibility in every way possible.
This manifested by introducing a segmented planning view that allows the user to pivot between strategic top-down and executional bottom-up perspectives, with the ability to start from any segment in the process, rather than forcing a standardized, linear approach. This was designed to meet merchants where they are in the planning process and bring them what they need for their unique area to make planning more comprehensible, more effective, and less repetitious.
The first few spaces in the Planning tool provide the top-level understanding of how their plan is tracking as a whole—the merchant’s budgets and goals, milestones, item set-up, strategic guidelines, and all the items currently in the plan in different stages.
“Rules” further enhanced those top-down workflows by allowing the user to stage strategic guidelines and choose when to have those rules executed on their plan.
The merchant can create rules to add, remove, or swap out items across locations en masse, and give guidelines for how that rule determines its outcomes—how many clubs to target, what performance criteria to factor in to the decision, and more.
This concept was a major point of interest and excitement for our stakeholders, as it was truly uncharted territory that gave merchants the efficient power of bulk actions.
Translating locations and items into a navigable world
Planning at different scopes was also a key consideration in designing this tool, and we worked to translate the fundamental subject matter in assortment planning (items and locations) into a navigable world that could be quickly and intentionally reorganized to support different workflows and mental models.
We introduced a location-based side navigation model for merchants to view their plan at various scopes—from aggregate levels to the individual club-level—and pivot from one club to the next to set their plans for each, propagating both upstream and downstream accordingly. This was also enhanced by adding the ability to copy a club’s plan (item list) from one location to others.
Users can also tab across the last three views in the tool and remain at their selected level to easily plan out all of the considerations for one particular location or group of locations at a time, demonstrating the power of connected, real-time data.
To make this navigational model even more powerful, we provided a way to view their plan by item rather than solely by location, to get an understanding of how each item is being allocated across the plan as a whole, and similarly be able to copy that plan from one item to another.
This is a view that is critical to planning, but is not one that is accessible in any existing tool they currently use—merchants have to piece this information together manually to gain this type of item-level understanding.
We introduced the timeline concept as its own tab within the Planning tool, giving the merchant a visual representation of the items in their plan and a sense of how long each item will occupy their assortment in the upcoming season at different scopes.
This view gives the user a quick understanding of any gaps in the plan and areas of overlap, allowing them to fine-tune efficiently.
Merchants often attempt to create a similar type of view in their excel documents, and this view gives them an automatically generated timeline visual that updates every time a change is made to their plan, reducing significant manual work.
We knew a critical point for merchant adoption would be to take their existing workflows and replicate and enhance them in this tool.
From working on various projects within Sam’s Club, we had gathered that the reality for merchants and other user groups is that excel is their playground—and we wanted to embrace this rather than attempting to replace it, to prevent lack of adoption due to introducing new ways of working.
For this reason, we created a way for merchants to create plans in this tool by quickly importing data from templated excel spreadsheets that they are currently working in, as well as other sources. This allowed us to balance the user’s preference for excel with the power of connected data in their digital systems.
Enhancing the practical reality of how merchants work
Another way we amplified the connection with excel is by allowing users to either edit directly in the tool or through targeted bulk downloads. By choosing items and data fields to download into a custom template, make bulk changes within excel, and then re-uploading the file, it allows the user to make large-scale changes in a much shorter amount of time and embraces how this product can communicate with excel instead of being a replacement for it.
Final deliverables
Concept design documentation
Concept summariesDocumentation of each core view we designed in the experience, explaining its purpose, content, and quick links to its components and clickable prototype sections
Recommendations Included more global recommendations for the product, such as how to strategically pare back to an MVP that takes both engineering constraints and user value into consideration
Detailed documentation of data & workflowsKnowing that we wouldn’t be working with this team through the user validation and build of the product, we wanted to set them up for the best success possible with detailed annotations and breakdowns of the screens and all of their content, features, and flows that could be brought to their engineering teams
Clickable prototype
The most valuable part of our delivery was a fully-functioning prototype of the tool’s entire experience.
This included not only navigating across the different views within the tool, but also filtering and navigating down further in depth in each space to view at different scopes, and included the majority of the critical jump-off workflows that could be completed within each view, like creating a new plan, adding and editing items, allocating items to clubs, etc.
The intent of this artifact was for our product stakeholders to be able to conduct more rich discovery with merchants, with a tool that felt as real as possible.
Later, our team got very positive feedback from our primary product stakeholder that this prototype had been crucial in getting alignment from not only users, but also other product owners and business stakeholders in the merchandising space, and that users were responding positively to such a revolutionary tool for a very critical part of their job.
Certain views and features like the Item List have even started being implemented by their engineering teams.