LJM.DESIGN

Background

Working as a pre-press manager for a print firm in Brisbane, a challenging crisis for the company came about when a large portion of the company’s revenue was jeopardised due to internal process failure and mismanagement from the department Head. I was asked to step out of my usual duties managing the pre-press and day-to-day design team and fix the issues that had arisen in the team that oversaw our major client portfolio.

This portfolio was graphic design and printing services of Point of Sale (PoS) and other promotional materials for a well-known fast-food franchise in Australia. If this client was lost due to the issues unfolding, there was a very high chance the company would close its doors.

The relationship with the Franchise Head Office and the 1600~ Franchisees was extremely strained at this point; orders were backed up by 2-3 months and more still were coming in. The morale of the staff dedicated to this client was at an all-time low.

Now you may be thinking, what does this have to do with UX? Everything, is the answer. The users or customers in this situation were the Franchisees ordering our products. But less apparent, the users were also the staff working on the client portfolio - and as much as the customers’ experience had suffered in the preceding months, so too had the staffs’ experience.

Journey

Being thrown into this crisis was a nerve-wracking experience to begin with, a lot of pressure was being placed on me to figure it out. There was no time to lose or worry about that, too much!

By breaking the problem down, talking with the people involved, and knowing what outcomes the business needed, that is recover the monthly revenue to budgeted forecasts; helped determine what initial action steps should be taken.

Discover and Define

With no time to waste, I immediately launched into an exploratory phase to discover how big the problem was and looked at the following:

• Triage existing orders and incoming emails, understand current state
• Engage with customers and learn exactly what their frustrations were… I didn’t have to ask in most cases, they were more than happy to tell me, very clearly. The phones were running hot.
• • Find out what was, and what was not working for the graphic design team and come up with ideas (collectively) on how things could be improved.
• • Outline a roadmap for the Franchise Head Office and co-ordinate with them more closely than had been previously occurring. This would also open the lines of communication to understand what new pressures may be coming so we could begin to act pre-emptive instead of being reactionary (e.g., new campaigns or product launches).

With this information I move forward with some clarity and understanding could of what needed to be improved on the customer front. For the design team, it was critical to get their input and ideas on what needed to change at their end, the following aspirational outcomes were decided to be the initial priority:

Design and Deliver

Once a solid understanding of the situation was at hand and ideas for improvement had been discussed, it was time to implement some changes. Here are some of the initial actions:

Separation of Responsibilities

Up to this point the team of Graphic Designers were heavily involved in the production process, as well as packing orders for despatch. Their time was more valuable to the business processing artwork, proofs for clients, and preparing approved designs for print. With this re-focussing of core responsibilities, it was decided to redeploy and underutilised staff member from a different area of the business to become a dedicated Production Assistant for this client. This increased the output of the designers as well as the speed in which orders were being fulfilled upon completion.

Digitising the Process

To help with the intended outcome of Increased awareness of order progress, steps were taken to incrementally digitise order management using Trello. Prior to this, everything was paper based and handwritten which resulted in a lot of time wasted searching for the information. With little-to-no direct financial support available for large scale system overhauls from upper management, it was important to be adaptive and work with what was available.

Making use of Trello enabled orders to be searchable and trackable along the defined production flow. It also improved the information we could provide customers when they made their inevitable phone queries. One final benefit this provided was that it brought the client team into the same environment as the pre-press department (my usual day-to-day job) which became even more important later in the journey.

Increase Designer Productivity and Streamline Workflow

The design assets and client library were in disarray. Initial changes born from conversations with the designers included centralising and restructuring the asset library with an agreed naming convention and filing system, this enabled the staff to work more cohesively instead of in the ad-hoc fashion they had been used to.

Improved Communication

To ensure everyone was working toward common goals, a number of communication initiatives were put in place:

After the initial problems were rectified, it took just 2 months for the budget to stabilise at the previously forecast figures and only one more for the forecasts to be exceeded; month after month. Much to my director’s surprise and relief.

But that’s not the end of the story… with the continued increase in order throughput there became a need for more head count to keep up, an extra designer was brought on board as a result, a process which I was also tasked with.

Further initiatives such as improved shipping times and costs through changing providers, ongoing adjustments to the order workflow efficiency facilitated through regular team discussions, even large-scale changes such as physical consolidation of the major client design team with the rest of the company’s design and pre-press team allowed for more scalability during busy periods (e.g., when a new campaign launched).