Problem
Repair technicians at The Home Depot find it difficult to manage inventory and order parts necessary to make customer and fleet repairs in a timely manner. As such, repairs for tools that could take days end up taking weeks to perform. Customers are unsure about the status and ETA of their tool when it is in repair, and the longer fleet tools are in repair, the less they are able be rented. This all amounts to inconvenience for the customer, pain for the store associate, and loss of profit for the business.
Process
The main persona for this undertaking was the veteran store associate (a repair tech with many years of experience), as they had the most insight into the user pain and had the most incentive to increase store profits. Their primary goal was to decrease the amount of time that customers had to wait on their tool to be repaired and to maximize the amount of time that tools were made available to rent. Using 1-on-1 interviews conducted by myself and my product manager, we identified high priority items that would be the most far reaching for a Minimal Viable Product. From there, we worked with the engineering team to streamline the parts ordering process for faster delivery and restocking options. We took multiple trips to rapid logistic centers to find strategies that we may be able to leverage in local stores and presented our findings to business stakeholders and operation managers. Before moving to production, we tested high fidelity prototypes in stores in the Metro Atlanta area, and gathered analytics around our pilot store that agreed to test the first iteration of the product.
Solution
We were able to come away with an information architecture that highlighted the primary needs of the technician to allow them the ability to work more efficiently and assess repair needs more accurately. As of 2018, the product was in a dozen pilot stores that voluntarily participated in testing. Of those stores, 8 actively used the product and found their parts ordering time to be significantly decreased and found the UI to be easier to use and navigate. We found that most technicians still found the existing software preferable because it allowed them to complete all of their tasks within one app. This allowed us to prioritize the needs of our end-user with additional features that they could use in the next iteration of the product.
