Quote2cash Workbench for IBM

The situation

  • Quote to cash or Q2C for short is a one of IBM’s financial arm that oversees any transaction from the quotation up to the cash payment stages.

  • Operated throughout Asia pacific, we need a software that helps to monitor business processes, RPA’s (Robotic process automation) status across different markets and systems in APAC.

  • Besides monitoring, it is important to identify the potential bottlenecks and blockers throughout each business processes to ensure future improvements and automations.

Discovery phase

  • Interview’s with the market leaders and key business leaders to identify key areas needed for further improvements.

  • Another key users are the “Kaizen’s”, who are responsible for building business relationships and main user of this app.

  • Created user personas and affinity mapping with project managers and data scientist.

Design phase

  • White board session with developers to get some key alignments on prospective features.

  • “Black hat” session with the Kaizens to determine what should be removed and added in terms of content and functionality.

  • Low-fidelity wireframes for next round of user’s validation session.

  • Feature prioritisation matrix session with the developers.

  • Studying IBM’s Carbon design system component to ensure that UI follows strictly to IBM UI standards for Hi-fidelity designs in Sketch/Figma.

Combining each user tasks flow with different scenarios in user journey map.

Outcomes & metrics

The Q2C benchmark was launch successfully in Dec 2021:

  • The initial MVP feature was widely circulated and names as a game changer according to APAC Business owners.

  • 60% of the users reported that the process monitoring systems helps them break and figure out solutions in the process quickly.

  • The Q2C workbench was then tweaked and changed as a gamification tool for the Kaizen Olympics as means for a solutions based competition called “Process-thon” to promote productivity across the region.

  • The early stages of AI development was launched in a form of as a chat-bot assistant to promote solutions gathering for the users.

My Specific contribution

As the sole designer for IBM’s Asia pacific region:

  • Provide solutions and pave the way for UX methodologies to be used for the Q2C setup.

  • Diving deeper into understanding the business systems across the APAC and finding the common patterns before crafting the UI solutions.

  • Complete UI/UX design from concept to final assets.

  • Collaboration with developers during implementation.

  • Post-launch analysis and iteration planning with data scientists’, project managers and fellow developers.

Lessons learned

Key Takeaways:

  1. Being the only UI/UX designer for a huge department, it’s important that we address things and communicate with the project managers before the scope gets overwhelming.

  2. It’s really important to strategise and find balance between research and design phase and managing expectations of the MVP.

  3. One of the key safest approach to this is to be someone whom people enjoying working only then you will make oneself approachable and breaking down barriers for collaboration.

  4. If the design requirement and user needs get too broad, designers need to find common patterns for the most pressing needs using the one size fits all approach.