An Interface to Write About
In a previous post I wrote how difficult it seems to be to develop effective user interfaces for demand planning. . Thus when I came across one that met my expectations, I thought I would write an article about it. The company is called ToolsGroup and the product is called SO99 (Service Optimizer 99). I have a separate post which discusses more of the functionality of the product which will come out in the future. Sufficed to say SO99 does quite number different things related to demand and supply planning and is part of a powerful classification of software called inventory optimization and multi echelon.
However in this post I wanted to focus on only the demand planning interface of SO99. Of the demand planning interfaces I have seen that are statistical, ToolsGroup has the best I have seen. I do not compare consensus based forecasting interfaces vs. statistical forecasting interfaces because I think they naturally have different designs. There are several reasons for this, but at a high level consensus forecasting interfaces tend to have much more aggregated inputs and forecasting.
The SO99 Demand Planning Interface
Below is the main demand planning interface:
What’s To Like
A few things I like about this interface is that the menu is very clear and the demand tab has what you need to get work done. The forecasting and demand planning drop downs offer more options. The selection criteria to the right flexibly can get to where you need to go, with the product structure and the market structure selection being the most powerful. Along the top I can drill down to different levels of date detail, and the time slot is really the bucket in which the green bars will be shown. Over to the far right, there is a selection for graphic display.
Historical vs. Forecast
Along the top there is a legend that shows what each of the bars represents. The green bars are history and the blue bars are the forecast. Something which is not shown in this screen shot, but which is very commendable is that a superseded demand history is shown as a transparent green bar. As soon as it was explained to me what a transparent bar was, it made immediate sense. Notice that the forecast has a series of different colored bars that represents the variability of the demand. With SO99, forecasts are not seen as a single value, but as a range of values, all of which are probabilistic.
Immediate Understanding for Users
Why SO99 scores so high is because everything is immediately understandable. There is very little of a learning curve with this interface because everything can be logically understood from simply studying in the interface. This is the ultimate goal of an interface. In addition things like a built in legend allows the demand planner to quickly reference any item on the screen. A second legend provides the details on things like the normal demand, expected forecast and so on. This means that just the high level averages are available without doing any work to click the item.
Conclusion
I evaluate a lot of supply chain software, and I am always thinking of whether I would want to roll the software out to users. I have done a lot of work in SAP SCM, which happens to have a front end that users don’t like very much. This means developing a lot of reports to give users what they need. However, reports don’t really give the same level of interactivity and usability as in application functionality. Reports are a bit like stopping a car to get vital statistic about the car, rather than being able to see these statistics while you are driving the car, and allowing you to respond immediately. As a consultant who has dealt with the lack of adoption of software on the part of business users, I can very much appreciate software with a natural and logical flow to its interface, and I can project how easy or difficult it would be to roll out to users. That is why when I see the ToolsGroup interface for forecasting, I get excited at the idea of rolling this out to the users. So, I put ToolsGroup is a similar category as Arena Solutions with regards to its front end. That is they are both exemplars of excellent interface design that deserve to be included in software selections for their respective areas (Arena Solution does BOM management), but should also be studied to understand what they have done right.