It’s common that the life of a Business Manager is full of challenges. With the different tasks and responsibilities they have comes multiple complications and stress on a daily basis.

As an intern at IOCL I dedicated my time to design a CRM that can manage the database which is currently on excel sheets. My goal as a product designer is to design a company resource management (CRM) software for Mid and large scale organizations.

Introduction :

Enterprise SaaS products are hard to build. It is not only difficult to figure out what features should be built, in which order, and how they should function, but it is also challenging to strike a balance between the amount of information displayed at any given time and the cognitive load the platform places on its users.

It’s common that lot of business face many challenges with managing huge pile of different data on a daily basis and they face multiple complications and stress if they have to do it on paper. One of those biggest challenge they face is the hours spent adding information and data on papers which is very frustrating considered a heavy daily task.

That’s where we come in as a product designer in charge of the CRM to make business lives a bit easier when it comes to data entry and organizing information.

Company Resource management system is the system used by different businesses to manage their various resources effectively. The CRM application will help to decrease the time users spend struggling with the data management and focus more on their clients and other tasks.

Problem Statement :

🏭 How can we help oil company make sense of complex data to make better decisions?

Indian Oil Corporation limited want to build their own Company Recourse Management (CRM) System to take all their data record, management online. They currently manage their data over MS excel and Salesforce CRM which is getting difficult for employee to learn.

My mission in this project is to design a user friendly system to ease and digitalize the managements of the resources.

Some of the features they demand are like below:

1. Dashboard with daily update of Petrol and Deiseal price, growth and order no.
2. To manage the upcoming, ongoing and finished order on Oil products.
3. To check the manufacturing process and the amount of wastage per process.
4. Report with detail analysis of order, process, manufacturing detail.
5. A Inventory maintenance page to check all the incoming and outgoing of stocks for the Oil product.
6. Employee Management system

Task :

My role is to design a single multi-functional tool, which could help the company’s employee to manage the resources of the company, also to digitize and ease of data management.

Challenges:

1. Our goal is to make the design universal so that any business can use it without much customization.
2. Easy-to-use product that doesn’t require any navigation.
3. Adapt the design to different age groups by keeping it simple but modern.

Design Process:

Used the Design Thinking approach for solving this problem. To practice design thinking we followed the below process.

User Research

I created the user surveys and conducted interviews to understand the problems. Several days of questions and answers were recorded, and based on the responses, the following key insights were derived.

• ‘User base’ — The survey found that most people who will use this product are managers and higher-level employees from IOCL
• ‘Experience’ — They don’t have any prior experience with such product other than MS software like excel or Salesforce (in a learning phase)
• Most of them are frustrated using old methods and want some quick solution.
• Some old Employee also get tones of paper printed to validate and tally the data and expenses.

Define Phase

Created personas to understand more about the user’s problems.

Ideation Phase

Created ecosystem to learn more about the domain, task flows to align design decisions with user’s behavior, and information architecture to understand the domain and IA which forms the basis for the product.

Card Sorting

We used the Optimal Sort tool to have participants sort cards, and the following categories emerged from the sort.

Design Phase

Followed the below steps in the design phase:

1. Paper Sketches and Ideations
2. Low-fidelity wireframes with variations
3. Mid-fidelity wireframes
4. Final Design

I started with paper prototypes and conducted usability testing on users.

It helped me to validate the principal flow, and the creation of a new various section to access the data of all departments. I also discovered that :

1. filters were still too technical in the excel sheets and needed to speak for themselves.
2. need of a simplified system with minimum input to manage the technical data during manufacturing process.
3. The number of rows and column data in the excel sheet was making user exhausted to manage and keep updating it when required.
4. An inventory management system that keeps track of incoming and outgoing stock.

Low-fidelity Wireframes:

The UI Designs

Dashboard for CRM :

Inventory Page:

Order Page:

Employee Page:

Usability Test

In Progress