As a research about to begin, one thing must be clarify — who are we going to study?

Things may get tough if customer made great profit in B2B supply chain by selling their products, but have no clue from their product end user. It can be dangerous when your success are based on your distributors’ success.

Case study will be our first step to figure our where the products go, how the products been used, in what circumstance, by whom.

Process start by one researcher gathering all possible past case by any possible way, study them quick and extract key information. In our case, key information including equipment deployed site, deployed amount, purpose, customer vertical, etc.

Over a hundred cases been analyzed and became pieces of paper card. And it is time for a workshop.

A workshop always welcome, or need participants from different background. Engineering? good. Psychology? good. Socioloy? nice. Industrial Design? pretty well. But remember, you should keep the participants number under 5 so it won’t get mess.

Team leader of workshop hold the pace, make sure every team member understand every paper card. Next, team member use KJ method and try to categorize those cards. There are no particular rule of how to categorize the cards, but one should enlight other members so they can understand your consideration.

After several round of grouping, team may turn silent. Try to pick a random group and exam it, see if any unreasonable exist. If no, then it’s time to name each group you got. Name should be representative so everyone can imagine what type of people you’re trying to refer.

After you give each group (hopefully under 5, no more than 10 even in a complex situation) a proper name, do check them with stakeholder, so they can verify it.

With stakeholder interview, discuss and decide the primary user. This step is crucial because stakeholders know better about the business model then you are. You’re here to help your customer, not lead them.