Case study: Inventory management for medical stores
PROBLEM STATEMENT 🤔
Design a product experience that would help pharmacists keep track of their inventory. Design the experience from the perspective of the pharmacist who wants to keep an easy check of the medicine inventory and also wants to speed up the process of managing it. Identify the pain points in the inventory management project and solve these pain points.
This problem statement was given to us in a design hackathon conducted in VIT Vellore. The time given was 5 days and the team consisted of myself and Hayat.
GOALS 💯
- Find user behavior and user pain points using various UX methodologies.
- Finding the MVP features of the website.
- Solve the problem with Hi-Fi prototype.
UX RESEARCH 🎡
Secondary research
I started off by googling about what exactly goes around with the inventory management of a medical store by reading blogs, articles and research paper to validate our initial assumptions.
If you count all your assets you always show a profit — Wilson Mizner
- Inventory management is defined as the continuing process of planning, organizing and controlling inventory that aims at minimizing the investment in inventory while balancing supply and demand.
- Specifically, the process aims at reducing procurement and carrying costs, while maintaining an effective stock of products to satisfy customer demands. Hence managing pharmaceutical products in that process is an integral part of the business model.
- There are three methods used in pharmacy to manage inventory: the visual method, the periodic method, and the perpetual method. Out of which the perpetual inventory management method is the most common and efficient method to manage pharmacy inventory. It involves a computerized system that monitors the inventory at all times on a continuous systematic basis.
- In this system, the inventory is manually entered into the computer software, and the appropriate amount of products is automatically reduced from the inventory when a prescription or medication order is filled.
Primary Research
We could interview only 3 pharmacists over a call because of the pandemic situation, over the interview we asked them for their daily tasks inventory management.
The interview helped us understand the user needs and pain points even better.
- A few still use old school pen paper techniques to manage their inventory but most of them shifted to a digital platform.
- The pharmacists experienced trouble by manually entering the medicines sold onto their computers in order to manage the inventory.
- The pharmacists experience trouble when medicine goes out of stock and causes discomfort to the customer.
- The pharmacists experience trouble while keeping track of the ordered inventory and while making the monthly/annual sales report.
This helped us create the User Persona and also list down the points for the Minimum Viable Product.
USER PERSONA
MVP 🦄
Features -
- Easy track of inventory with less work for pharmacists.
- Reminders to stock up before the medicine goes out of stock.
- Easy access to delivery partners and vendors.
- Visual representation of invoices and sales.
SOLUTION ✨
With all the insights we gathered from the research we established a process for implementing it into a hi-fi prototype. The first thing we did was use these insights and create an Information Architecture and User Flow for the entire website.
This gave us clarity on how to group certain features of the product and also establish a smooth experience for the pharmacists.
Once the user flow and IA was done, with the help of that we moved to Wireframing. We used Figma to make low fidelity wireframes. This was a time consuming process as it required constant changes according to the feedback we kept getting from our mentors.
WIREFRAMES
Check out the entire wireframes here.
VISUAL DESIGN
Now that we were satisfied with our wireframes we moved on to making the UIs in Figma. We first came up with a design system, where we made a color palette that fits the product and decided to work with DM sans as the font.
a. LOGIN / SIGNUP
- The sign up and login pages were kept very simple and only the necessary information from the pharmacists was collected. We gave an option to either login through email or through google account.
- We also made a forgot password page so that recovering the account remains easy for the uses.
b. DASHBOARD
- Gives a quick insight of number of out of stock products, low stock products, on route deliveries. Also gives a graphical representation about the stock.
- Easy navbar for Quick access of other pages and quick add product/bill/vendor option.
c. PRODUCTS
- The pharmacist gets an option to add medicines to his inventory either by adding it manually like the conventional approach or scan the medicine’s barcode from the box.
- To add the products by scanning, pharmacists can scan the barcode of the medicine box with the help of the partner app that allows them to scan, then the user has to enter the low stock warning number and then it shows a success prompt once the product is added to the inventory.
- The landing page here has all the products that are available in the inventory listed here, specific medicine can be easily searched using the search box or the sorting according to need.
d. BILLING
- The landing page here gives a quick insight on the sales and profits. It also shows the recent products sold.
- The bill is important to log every transaction, but here it also helps us manage the inventory.
- Whenever a bill is added the number of products sold will be reduced from the database, hence managing the inventory without having to manually reduce the numbers.
e. VENDORS
- The pharmacists have a hard time contacting and remembering the vendors, they mostly use their phones for this but it would help them keep if all their vendors’ contact info is available at one place!
- New vendors can be manually added.
f. DELIVERIES
- Pharmacists usually track their deliveries through their delivery partners website, but after establishing the integration they can track their orders from the website itself.
- The pharmacists will have to give the necessary info that can help us get the delivery data from the respective delivery website and display it onto our website.
g. NOTIFICATIONS
- The pharmacists get a reminder as a notification whenever a certain medicine is low in stock or out of stock or is arriving soon, so that the pharmacists can act accordingly and manage the inventory efficiently.
h. PROFILE
- The user can edit their personal info and choose to use their own display picture here by removing the default photo.
- The users can also log out from the platform from here.
i. FAQs
- The platform for a newcomer can be problematic, so we made a FAQ page where the platform’s functionalities can be explained.
PROTOTYPE 🥁
- All the UI screens are prototyped using interactive components and dissolve properties in figma.
- Click here to use the prototype.
That’s all folks!🐱🏍
Thank you for taking out time and reading this case study. We would love to hear any feedback or suggestions, it would be highly valuable for us. Feel free to reach out to us on Nishant — LinkedIn or Twitter , Hayat — LinkedIn or Twitter.
It would be amazing if you could give 50 claps to the article. Click/Tap and hold the clap button for a few seconds and BAM!
