Customer Interview Notes 2018 02 01 - NikoliVolkov/PickProgramGitHub GitHub Wiki

Key user tasks/journeys

Dispatcher, Pulling

  1. The user needs the ability to create a new invoice from a barcode
  2. The user needs the ability to close an invoice after the parts are accounted for
  3. Log in or out an available picker
  4. Assign a picker to pull a number of parts from a location (Upper, Lower, Both, Offsite)
  5. Indicate when parts are available off-site only

Supervisor

  1. Indicate when items were incorrect in an invoice
  2. Indicate when items not found were actually found, using 4 codes ("second look"):
  • Part was correctly slotted.
  • Part wasn’t slotted correctly, but nearby.
  • Part wasn’t nearby but still available.
  • Part not available at all.
  1. Dashboarding (supervisor only) Similar to IKEA
  • Show pickers offline, available, busy
  • Show invoices new, in progress, complete
  • Show performance by picker

Contextual Inquiry

Imagine a call center with 12 people. A customer calls asking for parts and an invoice (aka pick ticket) is drawn up. That document prints to my warehouse in multiple locations; there’re different printers for each dealership/type. These groups are not coordinating with each other.

Some of my parts are upstairs, some are downstairs, some are even both! Plus there are parts that aren't available here in the warehouse, those are off-site at the workshop where we actually work on the cars.

The idea is to have printing to one central printer with a single dispatcher. I want to feel like I have a log of what's going on, and that there's order to how we do things. Like this:

  1. Dispatcher picks the ticket.
  2. They scan it into a system (invoice #).
  3. They look at the items and decide which need to be pulled from our warehouse. Not In Scope
  4. They make decisions about batching the pulls (who does what). Not In Scope
  5. When the employees come in to work, the dispatcher has everyone’s tasks/jobs.
  6. Dispatcher instructs puller on the pull task for an invoice.

When the puller returns with all parts and completes the pull:

  1. Dispatcher records the invoice as complete.
  2. Dispatcher records any parts that weren't found.
  3. NOTE Dispatcher does not verify pulled parts.
  4. Dispatcher issues another task for puller.

As a supervisor, I want to know what's going on. I want a dashboard that shows me what the pullers are doing at any given time. I can track productivity across my people both on-the-fly and with rollup metrics. Like charts. My big questions are things like:

  • How many parts did someone pull per hour, on average?
  • How many invoices did they pull per day?
  • How many times did someone pull the wrong parts? Error rate.
  • What was the outcome of those wrong pulls?

NOTE: Some pullers only pull for part of the day, though. They're hourly workers so I need to be able to account for my workers only being on for a few hours, taking lunch breaks, taking smoke breaks, etc.

I want to be able to hold my pickers accountable. I want to have live-charting so I can check in at any time. I want to know what the most common mistakes are and where our efficiency is low.