MAKING SENSE OF THE SPAGHETTI
I was hired at Kroger Technology & Digital—24 on the Fortune 500 companies list—to create an application to be used by their Merchandising Team to create, maintain, and distribute the sellable assortment for their entire, nationwide e-commerce platform. When I joined KTD, this collection of assortments was being managed, archaically, in Excel. As you can likely imagine, the processes and connections built to support this solution were fragile and prone to breakage, riddled with hard-to-triage errors, and incapable of scaling. The goal of the Archon project was to create a tool for our Assortment Managers to have access to a database of items that could easily be assigned and removed from assortments, connect with other systems, automate common tasks, and eliminate as much manual minutia as possible. Over the course of a year and half we did all this and much more, modernizing a huge chunk of a 130+ year old grocery store’s merchandising process.
TIME TO GET SCHOOLED
I’ve never built a product for such a small group of users before—ten to be exact. And I’ve never worked as closely and for as long with the core users as on this project. I literally spent months at the beginning of the project in meetings before ever putting pen to digital paper. Some weeks I would meet with our core users 5+ times per week to conduct discovery conversations in order to suss out and document their current processes, needs, downstream consumers, and more. I worked very closely with our project manager and the engineering technical lead on the project to create flow charts for processes, intended automation pathways and validations, engineering diagrams, and journey maps. All of this work was invaluable for laying a solid foundation of knowledge (now documented and shareable, where it had never been before), empathetic understanding for our users pains, and the establishment of trust and rapport (where distrust had existed towards KTD due to past grievances).
PUTTING INSIGHTS INTO ACTION
After the initial discovery phase, we began building the web-based app that would become Archon. It gives the Assortment Managers access to a full library of items that Kroger is able to sell, including key item attributes and codes. The items can be manually assigned to assortments via this library, but—even better—we created automation to automatically “stream” items into assortments utilizing work that was already being done to populate brick & mortar store assortments.
We then created a framework of item statuses within Archon that would enable us to run validations and automate items through their assortment lifecycle, from being added, getting setup, being available for purchase, then phasing out, and eventually being removed from sale. This automation system took care of a huge chunk of the Assortment Manager’s daily workflow, eliminating lots of tedious spreadsheet editing and freeing up their time for more strategic planning work.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Since the initial launch of Archon we’ve worked hard on quality of life improvements, improving the reliability and amount of connections Archon makes to existing systems, and changing the way e-comm assortment data is consumed. We’ve recently moved completely off of Excel spreadsheets (we exported Archon data in the form of CSV data for an intermittent period) and connected to a shared data lake, DESP topic, and API hookup. This allows downstream consumers to have instant, any-time access to the assortment data rather than waiting for it to be exported once a week (or working off of stale data). We’ve also built out an extensive training course for onboarding all of our new view-only users.
REAPING REWARDS
After launching we’ve seen a significant reduction in incidents that require Assortment Manager triage. We’ve made the assortment visible and accessible to 50+ (and counting) view-only users, whenever they need to access the info. We’ve eliminated 10 manually maintained Excel spreadsheets. We have reduced time on task for many key tasks; anecdotally we reduced one teams weekly process from 4 hours to 10 minutes. Archon has also created a connected, scalable system that isn’t constrained by the limitations of Excel (data limitations, crashing, one user performing edits at a time, etc.).
We are continuing to build features to improve the usability (custom workspaces, to name one), connect to other Kroger apps to ingest and share data fluidly, and automate more and more manual tasks. The eventual goal of the system is to fully automate the current tedious labor work of the Assortment Managers so that they can fully migrate into strategic planning roles that better utilize their talents.