BACKGROUND

Store Teammates are currently spending 66 hours each week to process inventory coming into the store. More store labor is allocated to this process than any other in store task. The process today to unload inbound shipments is tedious and includes many steps from unloading the truck, to processing items in the cartons, to getting items to the right location in the store. 

CHALLENGE

Enhance Teammate efficiency and optimize the store inbound receiving process in order to save Teammate labor hours on back-of-house processes. 

MY ROLE

  • Lead Product Designer and assisting with Product Management role

  • Lead all research, facilitation, ideation, and design deliverables

  • Responsible for stakeholder communication, identifying value, and product roadmap.

PROBLEM DISCOVERY


”We as a business don’t have a great way to measure efficiency. Stores manually track everything on a white board in the back room.”

“It’s detrimental to the Athlete experience if a product is incorrectly priced when they check out or if they try to buy a product that has not launched yet.”

CURRENT STATE JOURNEY

Freight is costing stores an average of 66 hours per week, more than any other sales prep activity. 

Carton scanning enables..

TOP PROBLEMS

‘How Might We’ session with the team, including stakeholders. After ideation, the team voted on the top solution.

  • Teammates don’t always have a source of truth for how product needs processed (price change, MES security tag, fold, hang, product launch, etc.).

  • Since there is no process for scanning cartons, Teammates miss relevant carton information that could speed up their processing.

    For example, a store may accidentally receive a carton not intended for their store.

  • Teammates waste time taking items to sales floor, then having to take it back to the stockroom if it doesn’t fit.

LABOR ALLOCATION

The experiment allowed us to stay lean and learn quickly. It focused on how carton information could impact the Teammate which informed where in the process the scan would happen.

Both Teammate A and B were prompted with the same instructions: unpack each carton and place product into the YES MES or NO MES box. The Teammate must correctly determine in all 10 cartons what needs MES tagged vs. what does not.

HYPOTHESIS

IF Teammates have information about what is in a carton THEN this will enable them to be more efficient when processing MES security tags.

Impact vs. Effort

A/B TEST

See additional instructions

We worked with our Finance partners and based off our initial experimentation, looking at just cartons related to footwear and apparel, there is a labor savings potential of $5M. We are delivering the MVP in Q1 2025 and then will be able to book value based on a reduction in labor needed during the truck process. Success will me measured by:

  • An increase in carton per hour (CPH) = process more cartons per hour

  • Improved TIME process = better plan labor

As we collected Teammate feedback and usage analytics, this helped us understand how to enhance the experience and add more value to the carton scanning app. Some enhancements that we will prioritize for future iterations.

  • Printing automation for price change labels

  • Additional shipments, like store-to-store transfers

  • Add filters for new sets of data: brand new product, recalls, fold and hangs, product for a curbside pickup.

  • UI enhancements to allow Teammates to filter, sort, and mark products as complete

In-store demo for Stakeholders and leadership team.

If Teammates know what products needs security tagged (MES) and which products are launches then this will enable stores to process more efficiently (labor savings and compliance).

  • Pilot in 10 stores

  • Measure value by comparing truck processing time to the baseline of 6 hours.

Scan a carton

See carton contents

PREDICTED VALUE

FEEDBACK

NEWEST RELEASE


”We are supposed to have all inventory processing finished before store opening on truck days, this rarely happens.”

“We don’t know what’s in the cartons as we unload. The mixed apparel boxes take forever to sort due to the random assortment in them.”

Filter by task

The next release focused on performance improvements and the inclusion of price change information. As we continue to deliver enhancements, we remain committed to prioritizing high-value features that support our Teammates and drive business impact, ensuring we continually optimize inbound receiving operations in our stores.

PROBLEM PRIORITIZATION

TIME STUDIES

SOLUTION GENERATION

TOP SOLUTION

Scan a carton shipment to see contents

EXPERIMENT

HYPOTHESIS

MVP (MOST VIABLE PRODUCT)

ITERATE

”Extremely helpful when sorting inventory off the truck. Saves time not having to open larger packages like chairs and canopies to know what’s in them.”

- Freight Flow Lead, Store 1012

“This has been such a help for newer Teammates in apparel and enables them to be much more accurate when security tagging.”

- Assistant Store Manager, Store 389