Cavallo — Reimagining sales distribution on cloud
High Level Goal
Cavallo is a software-based company offering products that facilitate and simplify the management of inventory and sales distribution. Their solutions provide in-depth analytics and automate processes to accelerate the sales funnel and increase profits by identifying low-margin profit opportunities.
Client
Cavallo is a software-based company offering products that facilitate and simplify the management of inventory and sales distribution. Their solutions provide in-depth analytics and automate processes to accelerate the sales funnel and increase profits by identifying low-margin profit opportunities.
My Role
As a Product Designer at Very, I collaborate with Cavallo's product owners, engineers, and sales experts to thoroughly understand their existing SalesPad interface. Together, we identify potential improvements from a business perspective and ensure these align with insights gathered from a selected group of companies serving as beta testers for the next iteration of SalesPad.
Tools
Figma
Loom
Microsoft Business Central
The Challenge
Based on initial interviews, conversations, and workshops, we identified five key focus areas for the challenge of helping Cavallo reimagine their former Salespad product to their next product chapter. Our goals include not only modernizing the back-end infrastructure but also enhancing the user experience and addressing critical user pain points.
Scale from day 0: Cavallo had a clear vision for growing their distribution cloud (formerly SalesPad). With this mission in mind, we delivered Cavallo Design System V.1. This serves as the centerpiece for product expansion, ensuring a cohesive user experience, improving development times, and focusing efforts on delivering the best value.
Better sales overview: Transform operational chaos into complete control, enabling businesses to manage, organize, and monitor their sales documents across different queues automatically. This is achieved by following defined business rules based on a robust workflow setup, maximizing productivity, and reducing human error.
Sales documents simplified: We identified several critical user pain points related to document creation and repetitive tasks that the system can handle instead of the user. With this in mind, we re-imagined the document interface, incorporating intelligent features that minimize errors and improve document processing and shipment.
Improve management inventory: Managing inventory can be stressful, whether dealing with small or large, complex inventories. We aimed to improve how businesses manage their inventory to ensure they can plan for the future, access accurate data at the right time, and avoid shipping sales documents without sufficient stock.
Intuitive and robust workflow: The sales funnel required a powerful workflow to support the entire distribution process. We provided businesses with an intuitive yet robust interface to define their sales funnel, incorporating intelligent actions that identify weak spots in documents and route them to the appropriate queues. This automation reduces the need for manual revisions, allowing businesses to focus on maximizing profits and achieving their objectives.
Scale from day 0
Cavallo had an ambitious vision for re-imagining and redesigning much of their current portfolio while also releasing new features to meet recent business needs and address user pain points. Stakeholders and product leaders wanted to ensure that all products felt part of a cohesive ecosystem, offering a unified experience tailored to each product's unique value but with Cavallo's essence at its core.
To achieve this, we developed a solid baseline of primitive tokens, components, and user experience guidelines, setting the precedent for all future developments and new products on the roadmap. Cavallo Design System V.1 was an initiative led by me as a product designer and the Cavallo technical lead, ensuring a cohesive user experience across the distribution cloud's features and establishing guidelines for future product redesigns. This approach reduced development times and allowed Cavallo to deliver their first closed beta version in just four months, compared to the originally estimated seven months.
We established a team of developers and designers to act as the governance team responsible for expanding the design system and creating comprehensive documentation within the codebase. This ensured that every team member truly understood the value of design system thinking and adhered to patterns and user experience guidelines.
Better sales overview
We embarked on a journey to understand how businesses manage their sales documents and gain an overview of all their existing operations. Through initial research sessions with sales experts and business operators, we uncovered numerous insights into the challenges they face. One prominent issue was the time-consuming process of gathering comprehensive knowledge of their distribution operations, compounded by documents getting lost in the sea of sales. Businesses expressed a pressing need to organize this chaos and focus on critical aspects of their sales funnel.
In response to this customer need, we introduced Mission Control. This feature offers businesses a complete overview of all documents and their respective locations within the sales funnels. It provides crucial data such as order status, margin percentages, time spent in each queue, and other relevant information like revenue per document and total accumulation per queue.
Mission Control offers a customizable view, allowing users to focus only on the queues that are relevant to them. This enables sales expert teams to efficiently divide queue revision tasks and ensures the feature adapts to their specific needs. Additionally, we designed an intuitive column editor that empowers businesses to surface relevant information tailored to their unique processes, thus offering flexibility regardless of the scale of the business.
To further enhance user experience, we developed a robust filtering system. This system allows users to clear the table in each queue based on available columns, providing quick visibility of documents falling below or above certain revenue thresholds, specific document dates, and the ability to view only one's own sales documents as a sales expert. This feature enables businesses to locate the information they need with just a few clicks, improving visibility and simplifying data gathering.
With its clear visual hierarchy, simplified interface, and customizable view, Mission Control empowers businesses to gain complete control over their sales documents and funnel. It enables them to quickly identify documents stuck in the funnel, pinpoint low-margin items, and enhance sales productivity by focusing solely on the most relevant information to make informed business decisions.
Sales documents simplified
Sales documents are an essential component of every business, as they sustain operations and generate revenue. A well-crafted document, with accurate margins and information, enhances efficiency and minimizes errors. We aimed to streamline the document creation experience, simplifying it and reducing unnecessary steps that could lead to errors and wasted time.
Our approach began with creating a visual hierarchy of essential document information, dividing it into five key areas. The document header contains critical information such as customer details, total value, queue progress, applied business rules, and any discrepancies. Document details include creation information, creator identity, and sales representative details. Billing information covers payment terms, while shipping details include logistic information. Finally, the summary provides an overview of products, taxes, discounts, and totals.
We ensured this information is pre-saved and inherited from customer profiles, enabling sales reps to have most of it pre-populated, thus avoiding errors and saving time on repetitive tasks.
The product table is where sales representatives spend most of their time, adding products, quantities, and ensuring correct margins. We implemented the edit column feature to provide flexibility in visualizing cells and adapting to specific needs. This optimization not only speeds up product addition but also reduces human input by automatically inheriting product values from the system.
To facilitate direct communication and provide context, we implemented Notes. This comment system allows sales leads and business owners to provide crucial information not necessarily visible in the document, such as shipping policies, upsell terms, or customer-specific disclaimers.
Businesses also desired visibility into the history of sales documents, including past queues and activity changes. This feature enables sales leads and business owners to track document updates, understand the entire narrative, and gather insights for process improvement.
Re-imagining sales document capabilities and adding value-driven features posed a thoughtful challenge. We aimed to provide businesses with a robust document creation tool that minimizes human error while maintaining accurate margins. Through close beta testing, we observed a significant reduction in document shipment errors and an improved document creation-to-shipment time, from five days to 3 days representing a significantly reduced timeframe.
Improve Manage inventory
Inventory management is a challenging task for every business. We conducted extensive research to understand how businesses manage their inventory across different warehouses nationwide. Our goal was to identify their pain points, determine the most crucial features, and develop a robust inventory management system that adapts to any business, regardless of size.
We created a comprehensive product feature that provides businesses with a complete overview of their inventory. This feature includes current availability, on-hand quantities, reserved quantities, backordered quantities, and standard costs. It offers a high-level view of all products, making it easy to detect low-stock items and prevent over-promising quantities without sufficient stock.
Users can drill down into each product to gain context about its placement in open documents, including critical information such as allocated and reserved quantities and associated customers. Additionally, users can view inventory across different warehouses and access a historical record of sales, providing an in-depth look at each product and its inventory status.
Intuitive and robust workflow
The intelligent workflow builder empowers users to create rules that automatically stage, flag, or move documents through the sales funnel based on specific business needs. The Workflow Setup feature allows users to design a sequence of queues tailored for different types of sales documents, facilitating customized order processing and simplifying document management by tracking their status and enabling actions based on their position.
To ensure an intuitive user experience, we structured the queue setup into four main sections:
Primary Path
This is the default path a document follows if it adheres to all applicable rules and guidelines. It represents the logical next queue for the document unless specific rules are broken or attributes flagged for alternative paths.
Alternative Paths
Using an intuitive "if-then" methodology, users can create alternative paths with multiple conditions using natural language and dropdown selections. These conditions are evaluated for every sales document, and if any apply, the document is moved to the designated queue.
Business Rules
Within the workflow, users can set rules to determine how documents are forwarded. These rules specify when a document should move to another stage or queue if certain conditions are met. Users can define conditions based on margins, line item attributes such as quantity, and more. This robust condition builder allows businesses to automate manual reviews while aligning with their unique business models. In cases where rules are broken, a higher-level role may be required to approve the sales document before it continues on its normal path.
This comprehensive approach ensures that every user can easily set up queues with various business attributes, creating a seamless and efficient workflow that enhances productivity and accuracy.
This comprehensive approach ensures that every user can easily set up queues with various business attributes, creating a seamless and efficient workflow that enhances productivity and accuracy.
Results
In the end, we built an intelligent and robust distribution platform based on cloud services that improves business productivity, increases profits, and allows users to focus on what matters most.
With over 250 business customers adopting the cloud service, Cavallo Distribution Cloud is positioned as one of the best value products on the market. Our platform features an intelligent workflow engine that supports every business model and can handle a large volume of sales documents per minute. Additionally, it offers robust inventory management and an easy-to-use sales document creation system.
Reflection
Contributing to the next chapter of Cavallo Distribution Cloud has been incredibly rewarding. I've witnessed firsthand how our efforts have transformed day-to-day tasks and streamlined business operations. Tasks that once took entire days can now be completed in a matter of seconds, significantly boosting productivity and allowing businesses to focus on what matters most.
This experience has underscored the importance of always listening to users and finding feasible solutions to their pain points. Aligning your business with real product value is the only path to success.
