“What if obtaining inventory from our vendors could be as easy as online shopping?”

I took on a three month internship in 2021 at a local interior design startup, within their Digital Transformation department that focuses on discovering digital solutions to improve the company workflow. The company has a unique mode of operation where they templatise home makeovers to ensure a speedy process and mainly caters to property owners aiming to rent out their apartments/houses.

The team initially searched for off-the-shelf solutions to improve the process of ordering furniture from vendors (which typically consists of the designers going back-and-forth on Excel sheets and WhatsApp with the individual vendors) as the operations team was struggling to continue with the existing flow especially as the company is growing and taking on more projects.

However, we held a design sprint with members of both operations and digital transformation team, and realised that the needs and workflow of the company are too complex for generalised, mass-market solutions, and it was then decided that the best way moving forward would be to tailor-make a solution that fits all those needs.

The operations team suggested a process similar to buying things on typical e-commerce platforms, but with added functionality that suits them such as segmenting orders into different rooms within a unit, and the option to reserve an item before receiving confirmation from clients.

This is designed for desktop so that the designers can easily see everything on one page, and also go back and forth between other files they may have open while ordering such as cost estimation documents. All usable inventory be it stored with the company warehouse or with the vendors will be viewable in a marketplace format, and can be ordered for the individual client projects based on pre-set lists of items needed.

The issue being tackled is not as simple as providing a solution to the internal team, but also required an accompanying platform for the vendors where the inventory was being ordered from to completely streamline the process. We decided to design this for mobile instead of for desktop, keeping in mind that vendors may need to process orders and requests on the go and potentially while they are in warehouses or storage locations.

For some vendors, the company would make agreements for them to set aside a set number of inventory, but this is typically just a verbal agreement. So, we added these stock commitments into the app to have a more concrete view of what has been reserved.