Visibility
Shaping software and processes to integrate reuse into inventory management
Note: Information below is in general terms due to NDA. Details are borrowed from publicly available marketing materials and cited.
Goal: Pilot a tool called Visibility with a partner managing office inventory for a Fortune 500 company in order to “answer what?, where?, and can this be reused? in an instant”. (1)
My role: Project and client lead as Product Manager at Rheaply (2)
Timeline: 3 months for initial research and design in 2021, 6 months to launch of alpha platform in June 2022, project ongoing at Rheaply for 1.5+ years.
My wins: Stakeholder management which brought several companies together in workshops to collaborate on client strategies that saved money, time, and resources.
April 2023 Release Notes showing an overview with recent improvements of Visibility (3)
Overview
Rheaply is a resource exchange platform helping industry-leading organizations better visualize, quantify, and utilize their materials and resources so they can reach their sustainability goals. The goal of Visibility is to do just that with “resource discoverability, management, and deployment down to the individual asset level. With a number of features tailored specifically to help your business identify value and avoid over-procurement, you and your employees across all campus and warehouse locations can answer the question, what do we have, where, and is it available for reuse?” (4)
Simply put:
Gain visibility into inventory
Save money in furniture procurement
Satisfy users by improving time to fulfillment for workplace design projects
Meet sustainability goals by upholding commitments to reduce emissions and waste
Visibility’s pilot addressed the challenges of workplace resource management for a company with a multi-million dollar furniture portfolio. The project aimed to prove an inventory management tool could create a circular economy for reuse within a company.
Process
Members of the product and engineering teams sought to empathize and understand in as much depth as possible how our project partner’s inventory management processes worked, fill our gaps in knowledge around how to collect data on furniture, and help connect the dots between different players involved in inventory management.
During the initial 3-month discovery period, we engaged in primary and secondary methods of research. I led our research synthesis, providing the product perspective to build a new platform — different from Rheaply’s flagship marketplace — focused on cataloguing furniture data as the first step toward reuse at scale.
How might we create the easiest way to track and find resources that also serves as a single source of truth for all inventory teams?
I wrote a business requirements document and conferred with engineering team leads to write a technical build plan for the alpha launch. The solution roadmap these covered was informed by needfinding frameworks: our project partners’ goals, aspirations, and points-of-view about their key functions. Their perspectives translated into design requirements and principles for the alpha Visibility platform.
Visibility provides ways to save money, time, and the planet (5)
After the alpha launch, we shifted from building designs in the original specification documents to a monthly agile build process that paved the way for our beta and beyond. Researching, prototyping, and building became ongoing exercises during each two-week development sprint. As a product manager, I collaborated with a product development pod of a lead engineer and a UX designer to direct roadmap changes and refine features. I also coordinated with customer success managers and project mangers internal to Rheaply and on our client/project partner’s team to approve plans and incorporate feedback.
My contributions to research and development included:
50+ sessions of primary source research with warehouse, management, data, technology, and end user teams in 5 stakeholder organizations;
Interviewing single participants and groups, on-site observation sessions, weekly interactive prototyping with wireframe and flowchart presentations, and user acceptance testing with functional prototypes in a development sandbox;
Prep work for all of the above, creating guides and templates for each meeting, interview, or testing session;
Designing stakeholder presentations and presenting progress updates.
Outcome
By the beta launch in early 2023, Visibility’s user base was growing as dozens of users from our pilot partner’s inventory teams had already catalogued tens of thousands of pieces of furniture and opened up the system for other teams within their company to claim these resources for their workplace needs.
Key capabilities of the Visibility tool (5)
The core of this project — centering reuse as a way to manage inventory — proved to resonate with companies beyond the initial pilot partner. Collecting a company’s inventory data so that users can have more opportunities to source locally helps provide certainty when preparing for potential disruptions to supply chains, opens more ways to get use out of furniture that is laying idle, and even helps avoid scope 3 emissions by not adding embodied carbon, which is present when manufacturing a new item.
Rheaply has continued to focus on inventory management of workplace resources as a way to engage more partners in the ecosystem, and it proved to be a draw for prospective customers. There have been some innovative partnerships already, with a recent guide on How to become your own OEM of furniture through circularity. (6)
The “aha!” moment for me came from realizing the most successful inventory management systems avoid creating pains off-platform as much as they can create delight on-platform. Inventory management and project fulfillment is a labor-intensive, human-influenced process, and I found that while we could build an easy-to-use interface with niche features, being a useful product required providing accurate information to solve logistical hurdles. Data was paramount to successful reuse. Availability and standardized furniture specifications made the difference between something continuing to sit in the warehouse or getting used in a project.
This project fueled my interest in making the circular economy work at scale. In my graduate studies, I plan to address hurdles by better understanding an individual’s decision-making in their organizational, spatial, and urban context. Specifically, analyzing macro-level influence on behavior such as:
Why did the grassroots project Buy Nothing (7) successfully allow millions of people to participate in local resource-sharing on Facebook, only to collapse when moved to an independent app?
How have people from around the world engaged in mutual aid economics, and how do they adapt to new contexts after emigration?
How might these practices be harnessed in policy as well as reflected in embodied carbon reporting to motivate progress toward net zero goals?
References
Media Kit - cover image, company description in “Overview”