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True Friends — BUFAB — True Friends 96

True Friends

BUFAB

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About

Bufab is a global full service partner for C-parts. They reached out to us when I was working at Nethouse and of course we answered.

Bufab needed to solve many different problems. Some for the people working with sales and trading between customers and manufacturing suppliers, and some for the manufacturing suppliers themselves.

We quickly came to the conclusion that this would require two custom built systems that integrated with each other.

One system would allow Bufab to add manufacturing suppliers in a portal. The suppliers contained detailed information about their manufacturing capabilities, ISO certifications and contact information. The suppliers could also update their own capabilities and certifications via a shared link if they where to change. In this portal Bufab could search and filter the suppliers by criteria such as manufacturing capabilities, certification and location.

The other system replaced a huge Excel that they had worked with for a long time. It was an interactive RFQ (Request for quotation) configurator. The sales personnel could create customer requests, set manufacturing criteria, price items and send quotations to customers almost instantly. The system could match items requested from customers with suppliers manufacturing capabilities via an integration to the other system. This enabled suppliers to quickly respond to new RFQs and provided a streamlined flow from RFQ to sale for everyone involved.

My role

My role in this project was to design the User Experience, User Interface and lead the testing. The system was branded according to Bufab’s styling guide.

Workflow

Our work started with a few days of workshops at our office together with the product owners from Bufab and a few of their sales and supplier personnel that was assigned the roles of super users. During the workshops we tried to understand their problems, their day to day and their workflow. We also did several visits to their offices and warehouse to gain further insights into their daily work.

A timeline of one sprint, from sprint planning through to demo day.
I created a fun little timeline that we put up in the team room to visualize our sprints and our various activities. We required at least one day of Extreme/Mob programming, internally we called this PÖBEL.

In the design process we analysed the insights that we had gathered during our workshops and field visits. We clustered business goals, user needs, problems, workflows and mapped it to user flows for the systems. We refined our ideas regularly with the stakeholders and super users.

The design process was continuous throughout the entire project. I worked a lot with prototyping of the systems to present our ideas to the customer, discuss the flows and functions with them and their users to test it and gather feedback before we started to build it. This iterative process was ongoing and helped us to gain a common understanding on what and how the feature/flow was going to work and look, it also minimised the risk for surprises and misunderstanding.

A hand-drawn interface sketch in a notebook.
A picture of my very cluttered notebook, fully encrypted.

During all of this I also managed the testing part of this project. I worked a lot with prioritising our testing efforts based on risk and our identified quality criterias. The testing efforts included integration testing, APIs, functional, backend, browser and OS compatibility, frontend, usability, exploratory testing and verification tests. I held testing sessions each sprint with the entire development team as well as with Bufab personnel in acceptance testing and user testing (I didn't tell them what to test but I guided and help them).

A mind map covering the test plan. A second mind map from the same project.
Two examples of my mind maps. Mind mapping is a vital tool in my workflow, supporting everything from research and visualization to design and testing activities.

The end result of all this work was two systems that transformed Bufab's operations. They received a maintainable and accessible supplier portal and an intuitive RFQ sales process which improved the efficiency for their sales personnel and supplier managers as well as also getting more enjoyable systems to work with on a daily basis.

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About True Friends 96

True Friends 96
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A creative and technical studio & consulting firm based in Motala, Sweden, but available worldwide.

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True Friends is a creative and technical studio & consulting firm. Based in Motala, Sweden. Available worldwide.

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