Increased poultry category sales
Challenge
How might we become the preferred place to purchase poultry in Costa Rica?
Achievement
Increased the assortment by 15% in the stores based on changes in customer behavior
My Role
Service Designer, Researcher, Facilitator, Prototyping
Timeline:
6 Months
Year:
2019
The method
I approached this project as a typical Service design project. It was my first project on the company, so I mapped the stakeholders, made a high-level process mapping, and interviewed users to understand the front stage of the process.
The team
A multidisciplinary team was put together, including all the roles involved in the process, making a high-level cross-functional team.
People from finances, sales, production, operations, supply, plants, and even farms.The team had an Agile Business Coach and a Service Designer (ME) as facilitators during the process.
The process
I found no documentation, owner, or understanding by mapping the process. Broken process into three areas, Production, Comercial, and Operations.
I found in the user interviews that the commercial strategy we had implemented for the past 20 years changed dramatically, impacting the purchasing process and the user behavior towards the category.
The Production area was overproducing to reduce the cost, but that only increased the inventory and storage cost impacting the price and the commercial strategy. Meanwhile, the operations were manipulating the price in the stores, moving the margin.
The pricing strategy was going up, and the customer knew that prices were going up.
We added five new items to the category, two based on the customer purchasing behavior of frozen food and three based on seasonal consumption that matches the overstock.
Learnings
I showed that many process steps were neglected responsibilities of some team members. I had to be prepared with enough factual evidence to present the bad news to the executive committee.
I understood during the process that I was mapping four different services, and the vast majority were backstage services interacting between them.
Farm to the Plant
Plant to Commercial
Commercial to Store
Store to Customer