Challenge: How to simplify the purchasing process
ADHI is an Indonesian construction company that always aims to provide the best for the national developing construction industry. Their experience and their successes bring ADHI to be one of the most well-known companies in Southeast Asia.
To be able to give the best to the society, ADHI needs support from their vendor partner. Until now, ADHI has partnered with hundreds of construction materials providers. However, the flow of requesting, approving, buying, and distributing the materials still needs some improvement to make it easier, faster, and more transparent.
Solutions: Digitalizing the buying and selling process
As a solution to cover all the process of material buying and selling, ADHI decided to make ADHI E-marketplace, a B2B marketplace exclusively made for ADHI as the buyer and their vendor partner as material suppliers. The objective of this marketplace is to simplify the process of choosing materials or services according to the requirements, choosing vendors, comparing prices, and controlling the procurement of service and materials including price efficiency.
However, the process is not as simple as the buying process in other marketplaces. Since the platform is used exclusively for internal purpose, it should be adjusted to regulations of the company, especially regulations related to procurement. Hence, there are some important additional steps. Before the project department gets the things they need, their request has to go through approval from the company. And as for the vendor, they need to complete some required documents before they can get the payment. These additional but important processes had always been done manually, so it took quite a long time and seemed not transparent. By creating the marketplace, all these processes will be done digitally and become much easier and more transparent for everyone.
Not only that, but the marketplace will also benefit the vendor in selling their stuff. The platform allows them to show all the materials and services they provide including the price. This feature supports healthy competition among the vendors.
Constructing the Information Architecture of the marketplace
However, the concept and the goal of this marketplace still need a perfect sitemap and user journey for it to work smoothly. To do this, ADHI worked together with Suitmedia as the IT consultant. For the platform, Suitmedia did some consulting steps to make sure the marketplace can cover all the needs of its user.
To start it all, Suitmedia needed to get familiar with the user. We had to understand how they work and how they think. Thus, we did some research by interviewing the user and developer of ADHI E-marketplace that includes the company’s supply chain management, IT department, project department, finance department, managers and general managers of related departments, and the material vendors. After the interview, it became easier to put ourselves in their shoes.
After we understood the characters of the users, including their wants and needs, we prepared weekly reports. These reports show the sitemap for ADHI E-marketplace website and activity diagram. From the diagram, we can get detailed information about the function, activity, and journey of the user on the website.
The interviewing and reporting processes took a whole month to complete. During the process, we did some adjustments on the structure of the sitemap and the activity diagram. The changes were affected by the interviews and data analysis. We made sure that the sitemap and user journey we propose can be useful as a guide to build a helpful marketplace for ADHI.
The final result of the process is the Business Requirement Document or BRD. As important as the name sounds, this document is essential as the reference to build website flow and fixed sitemap. It also gives information about the users and the activity that will happen on the website. Simply put, this document is the holy book for the developer in building ADHI E-marketplace. Through this BRD, the company has a clear and solid guide to create a great user experience for their E-marketplace. Now everything is ready to start assembling the platform.
