Data was entered again and again
Employees were managing large amounts of production data in Excel. Article details were often retyped for every order, which made the work slow and easy to get wrong.
MANUFACTURING ERP• B2B 2023
Designing an ERP for a factory that had outgrown Excel
CONTEXT
The factory wanted to move from Excel to
an ERP
This was a 5,000+ employee leather shoe factory where production still depended on Excel sheets, printed
job cards, and people carrying updates from one department to another.
The objective of this project was to design and implement an ERP tool tailored for a leather shoe factory,
aimed at digitizing and streamlining their production and operational processes.
CONTRIBUTION
My contributions were across...
User Research
User Interview
Affinity Mapping
Hi-Fi Wireframe
Visual Design
Design System
PRD
Dev Support
RESEARCH
Research and User Analysis
We spent 3+ weeks at the factory, sitting with different teams and following how work moved from one department to another.
A lot of the process depended on manual follow-up. Commercial would create order or article details. Inventory, purchase, or production would need the same information later. Sometimes it moved through a printout. Sometimes through an Excel sheet, a phone call, or someone reminding the next person.
Key findings from the On-site Research
Reports and job cards were hard to track
All documents moved through printouts and shared files. Tracking missed information caused unwanted delays.
Paper was part of the production workflow
Reports, job cards, and other documents were printed regularly. This added cost and made updates harder to control once the document had moved to another team.
Updates were not reaching teams fast enough
Many decisions depended on offline handoffs. If inventory, purchase, or production did not receive an update on time, the delay moved into the next step.
Material tracking was unreliable
Teams struggled to track materials against the right division, order, supplier, or production need. When materials were misallocated, production could slow down.
Sensitive data was difficult to control
Because information moved through physical documents and manually shared files, confidential data was harder to protect.
Complex orders made the problem worse
A single order could include more than 100 articles. Repeating article details across departments made order management slower than it needed to be.
SOLUTION DESIGN
We designed the ERP around how each department worked
To address these problems, we designed a comprehensive ERP tool tailored to the specific needs of the factory. The solution design included the following key modules:
Master Admin
User access control, Material mapping
Commercial
Create, edit or map articles into an order.
Inventory and Purchase
Track and manage inventory
Production
Supervision and updates
DESIGN PROCESS
User Flow Diagrams
We created detailed user flows for each department to ensure seamless interaction.
HI-FI wireframe
Developed wireframes and prototypes for user feedback and iterative improvements.
A structured visual design
Designed a clean, intuitive UI that aligns with the user needs identified during research.
A peek at the Design Guidelines
Created a proper design guidelines for size, spacing, fonts and also interaction guidelines which helped for the developers.
IMPLEMENTATION
The work did not stop at the final screens
PRD
We turned the design into a PRD so the development team could understand how each module connected.
Dev Support
I worked with the developers during implementation to clarify flows and edge cases.
User Training
We also trained users from different departments and collected feedback from their daily use for improvements.
KEY OUTCOMES
The factory moved from Excel-led handoffs to one connected workflow
Less repeated entry
Article and order details could be reused across the flow instead of being entered again in every department.
Less paper dependency
Reports and job cards no longer had to depend only on printed documents moving from one team to another.
Better control over access
Department-level permissions made it easier to protect confidential information.
Clearer material tracking
Materials could be mapped to divisions, groups, sub-groups, dependencies, and suppliers in one place.
Faster production updates
Supervisors could update progress through tablets, reducing delays caused by offline handoffs.
Cleaner order management
Orders, articles, material requirements, and job cards stayed connected inside the system.
REFLECTION
The workflow mattered more than the screens
This project taught me that enterprise UX starts with understanding how work moves. Once we understood the handoffs between commercial, inventory, purchase, and production, the screen decisions became much clearer.