A hub and spoke product suite used to manage Google's complex and growing supply chain. Five familial products give planners, analysts, engineers, and management a way to collect and resolve exceptions, manage supply chain orders and reservations, and provide a foundational data layer to improve future forecasting and planning tools.
Google's expansion into hardware and growth in product mix in conjunction with ambitions in retail drove operational needs not supported by existing 3rd party solutions as well as existing first party ones. Even with similarly shared needs, priorities and requirements varied across different stakeholder often shifting to meet seasonal launch schedule. I priorities systems focussed solutions in order to drive alignment between teams.
Engineers and business stakeholders were often also the users. Processes varied by team, but leveraged collaborative whiteboarding sessions to define the problem and start to identify priorities around data points. Quickly to high fidelity designs as prototypes encouraged iterative improvements and helped identify layout issues with different data requirements..
A centralized repository for exceptions thrown by tools and systems that run all of the supply chain operations. Header level data, exception details, and resolution steps are unique and fluid across the system's stack; EMF codified a structured way to group and display exceptions from multiple systems——segmented to specific users' access permissions. Contextual resolution flows enable different actions, instructions, and product integrations depending on the specific requirements of individual or bulk exception resolutions.
A tool that enables planners to manually release orders and easily evaluate and adjust what orders are impacted. Tight integration with the order processing system gives fine grained control over impacted orders with pegged and un-pegged quantities from available inventory within the global supply chain.
A status board view of supply exceptions that enables users to browse broad groups of exceptions in order to identify problematic patterns to subsequently refine business processes and operational partner relationships.
An extension of EMF that adds additional filtering abilities and line level edits to address errors caught from integrations with third party logistics companies, distributers, and manufactures.
A tool that allows users to review reservations and inventory numbers in order to make adjustments to reservation quantities. Manually adjusting quantities enables corrections to inventory for scenarios where product is lost, held, recalled, or made available.
