Foxtrot Co.

Summary

Foxtrot is an upscale convenience store with a mobile app that lets customers shop their curated collections of drinks, food, and everyday essentials. As a digital-first commerce platform, there were some growing pains with its rapid retail expansion.

Briefing

Foxtrot was rapidly expanding its store locations, and hiring many new staff members as a result. Staff members' key responsibilities include: delivering online orders, checking out in-store customers, and keeping an accurate count of inventory in the store. The influx of new staff members made it difficult to establish standardized training and work processes across stores. As a result, the inventory management was not at the level Foxtrot wanted it to be.

My team's goal was to assist in creating an internal tool that would help stores reach a more desirable inventory accuracy, while making processes simpler for the staff working in store.

Research

Foxtrot has three types of physical locations: warehouse, delivery, and non-delivery. My team and I visited each location type to observe their daily duties, and to ask a few questions. Upon our visit we discovered that each location type had different priorities, physical layouts, and methods of training new hires.

We interviewed the managers of each location to assess the team's challenges and how we could tailor the internal app to address those issues while also solving for the original issue of lost inventory.

Defining the problem

From the research I felt that we had to create an app that could be customized by manager's to fit their store's problems and goals. We had to align our business goal of improving inventory count with each store type's and each employee's goals.

After synthesizing our research and discussing it with the rest of the team, we noticed the problem wasn't just that inventory was getting lost, or that the staff lacked training. Some stores were more focused on delivering online orders, while other stores were focused on preparing in-store orders for rush hour customers. Ultimately, inventory accuracy was the least of their concerns and most of the staff invented their own process for reporting inventory.

Designing Solutions

Solution #1: Minimize room for human error

Foxtrot already had a web platform in place for employees to record inventory counts and submit orders for more products. This was only accessible through one laptop, so many employees used pen and paper or their memory to keep track of dozens of counts. On top of this, employees had to identify products by triple checking product variations (flavours), size (500 ml vs 750mL), and count (single count or 4 pack). To solve for this I designed a feature where employees could scan the product's barcode to verify it was the correct product before continuing the inventory count.

Solution #2: Allow each store to create their own rules within the app

One method of keeping accurate inventory counts is to perform a cycle count. This is a method of checking the number of physical items in store and confirming it matches their records. In store items are stored at the front of house for customers to purchase, and back of house for staff to use to replenish front of house stock, or place in delivery orders. The problem with this is that every store did not have a universal location, or even one area for products. For example a bag of gummies could be found in 4 different areas of the store making it difficult for employees to find every item.

One proposed solution to this was to add multiple "location counts" for the counter to add at their own discretion.

Solution #3: Give store team members instructions

In order to keep accurate records of inventory, cycle counts have to be performed regularly. However, staff members weren't being delegate the task of counting items because it wouldn't be efficient for the manager to spend their time delegating these tasks individually.

To help staff manage their tasks and fit cycle counting into their daily duties, we designed a task list with varying levels of priority.