E-procurement

Background

SVIMS Healthcare handles a large volume of tenders annually, ranging from 300 to 500, each critical for its healthcare and research operations. These tenders with financial dealings between ₹50 to ₹100 crores ($6.7 to $13.7 million) pose a critical challenge as there are significant risks of errors as mistakes could cause a loss of millions of dollars in revenue or forfeiture of the tender. Error-minimized management of these tenders is essential for SVIMS, directly impacting its patient care and overall operational efficiency.

my Role

Led the end to end design and collaborated with development and leadership to identify employee issues and address them in the revamp of procurement portal.

Impact

The designs were met with outstanding positive sentiment from the employees and projected a reduction in 86% processing time and an improvement of 67% in employee satisfaction during the initial testing.

existing platform

Employees do a lot of work manually and go back and forth between spreadsheets.

The procurement portal had it’s last refresh in 2009 and was outdated and required a much needed update. Employees had to do a lot of work manually and had to go back and forth between spreadsheets and portal and the resulted in mishaps with data and repetitive work.

granular problems (Before)

Revised Goal

Revamp while maintaining familiarity with the existing platform. Address employee concerns in the revamp while maintaining familiarity with the existing platform.

Iterations

Hypothesizing a successful compromise.

Keeping the employee concerns, dev constraints and business goals in mind, I ideated on different approaches to come up with an effective solution and generated ideas that lay the foundation of the workflow, and evaluated them based on feedback in order to land on the best option.

Uploading items in bulk

v1 - isolated upload modal

❌ Not enough space to show progress for uploading multiple files.

v2 - full-screen takeover

❌ Can only input item details only after uploading the sheets.

v3 - upload + input

✅ Able to input item details without needing to upload sheets.

Solution

Here's how it works.

The job of the employee needs them to upload and items, evaluate tenders and track the status of their approvals. Hence, I designed a new bulk uploading flow which lets the employee upload and evaluate parameters without having to worry about the anxiety of entering wrong item codes and carried over some of the previous patterns to shorten the learning curve and adaptability.

The Revamped procurement portal

Highlights

A more straight forward bulk-upload workflow.

The updated bulk upload flow has a built-in input table to reduce the mistakes happening through the spreadsheets and the item codes are autogenerated so that employees don't have to worry about making mistakes and manually filling them.

Highlights

Track and evaluate multiple tenders at a time.

The employees were not able to evaluate multiple bids at the same time without opening a new tab for mentioning the reason and this casued an issue where employees were opening 10-20 windows at a time and sometimes ended up forgetting which tender they're commenting on due to the lack of a signifier or an indicator of which employee to specify the reason on.

Retrospective

Reflection

What started as a simple update turned into a full-on redesign to fix problems that employees were facing. The biggest challenge for me was getting the people in charge to understand why these issues were important and to agree on fixing them. I made sure to set clear goals and involve development from the start, which helped the project go smoothly. This way, we made sure our plans worked well with our constraints and be cognizant of was actually possible to do.

After the redesign, we first tested the updated portal with 16 employees to see if it really made a difference. If it was successful, we planned to roll it out across the whole organization. The test revealed that the updated flow significantly outperformed the old flow with a substantial increase in satisfaction (+67%) and (-86%) in processing time‍, a big win for what was on the surface, a simple portal refresh. In the end the documented patterns were componentized in the code and the revamp is extended throughout the organisation.