Cardinal Health Medicine Distribution Panel
Cardinal Health Medicine Distribution Panel is a visualization class project that helped me think from an engineer's perspective. Four visualization techniques have been used in this panel design: frames of reference, put data into context, highlight changes and events, and highlight contrast. This system design is different from traditional website designs and mobile app designs, because what operators need is an easy and intuitive panel that they can see everything at their first sight rather than click through different menu bars.
Cardinal Health strives to help its customers save costs and decrease waste by assessing the reliability of the chosen 10 suppliers. Seeing trends of this four frame of reference would help to improve the overall flow of the supply chain. Thus, the trends evaluated would be invaluable for both Cardinal Health and their customers.
Duration: 3 weeks
My Role
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Collaborated with group members to work on the Cardinal Health Medicine distribution panel
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Divided tasks into small blocks, drew the node map and came up with four frames of references that our group was focusing on
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Worked on scenario design and finished the prototype design work for scenario one and scenario three
THE DESIGN OBJECTIVIES
Reliability is the most important factor we need to consider.
Open quantity is defined as the differences between the order quantity and the actual quantity that is received by the customers. A smaller amount of open quantity suggests better reliability as the customers received exactly what they needed and ordered.
Ordered quantity showed how much we have ordered from suppliers. In order to deliver our product to the store on time, we needed to consider lead time/fill rate and received quantity.
Four Techniques of Data Visualization
1. Discover frames of reference
Scenario 1:
(Which store gets their product from which supplier?)
The management of CVS North High Street received their orders as the per expected shipping date. During restocking of the shelves, the employees realize that they were missing a pack of half a dozen YeOld Timey Medicine from one of the 3 boxes that they ordered. They would like to know which supplier that they should contact regarding this situation.
2. Put data into context.
Scenario 2:
(What Does CVS care about?)
CVS North High Street made a call to our logistic planner to make sure that their order for 4 Lung medicine for YaLungs (00567923), 3 Eye Medicine For Ya Eyes (00532110), 3 YeOlde Timey medicine (00583602) will be less than $800 and they expect the orders to arrive by the 05/03/2018 before the expected time of the product.
3. Highlight change and events
Scenario 3:
The store manager of CVS North High street was making her rounds and reorganizing the storage room when she found an extra 2 boxes of Eye Medicine For Ya Eyes in the corner of their inventory room. She informs the employee representative of Cardinal Health about the situation and request that the initial quantity ordered should be change and updated to prevent any extra inventory storage cost to occur.
4. Highlight contrasts
Scenario 4:
(Not filled how ? Suboptimal carts)
The employee of Cardinal Health is doing his job in planning the logistic of the supplier and customer. He is working on deciding the best supplier to complete the orders made by CVS North High Street by utilizing the Cardinal Health Scheduler. After filling in all the criteria’s requested by the store the scheduler was not able to find a specific supplier to fulfill the orders requested by the Customer. How would the employee come to terms with this problem?
DESIGN PROTOTYPES
Above is the overall view of the panel
Scenario One
We want to know which store gets their product from which supplier, which means that correlation that built up between stores and suppliers.
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The management of CVS North High Street received their orders as the per expected shipping date.
During restocking of the shelves, the employees realize that they were missing a pack of half a dozen YeOld Timey Medicine from one of the 3 boxes that they ordered.
They would like to know which supplier that they should contact regarding this situation.
The specific procedures of knowing which suppliers are responsible.
-Call the Cardinal Heath first
-Ask them help CVS to get the information of completed order history
-Operator who in charge would search and look at the blue table to find out the information of suppliers
-Finally, the operator would tell the CVS the relevant supplier and they would know which supplier that they should contact regarding this situation.
Scenario Three
The store manager of CVS North High street was making her rounds and reorganizing the storage room when she found an extra 2 boxes of Eye Medicine For Ya Eyes in the corner of their inventory room. She informs the employee representative of Cardinal Health about the situation and request that the initial quantity ordered should be change and updated to prevent any extra inventory storage cost to occur.
Ordering Panel
Make changes Panel (highlight contrast)
Initinal Panel
REFLECTIONS
Considering frames of references into the design process is important
By taking this data visualization class with engineering students, I was inspired to think from an engineer's perspective. The feature and user experience of an application is important. At the same, frames of references is what engineers value the most. Rather than showing only part of the functions through filter function, sometimes what engineers want is to see the whole panel. Communicating with them in advance could resolve this to some extent. Also, creating scenarios is very helpful to visualize the step by step process and design of an application.
More works
