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Untangling Field Procurement & Logistics in a Tobacco Supply Chain

Led the design of a field-ready procurement system that transformed fragmented manual processes into a scalable digital workflow, accelerating approvals, improving data reliability, and enabling cross-team efficiency across the enterprise.

Domain

ERP,  Supply chain,

Procurement,

Field Operations.

My Role

Lead Product Designer

Duration

~75 Days

Client

ITC INDIVISION LTD (IIVL)

Team Structure

Product Manager,

Business Analyst,

Frontend Backend Developers,

IIVL field team.

Pink Gradient Background

20 Second Impact Overview

4× faster procurement cycle, Reduced from 4 days to 1.

100% manual paperwork eliminated across buying, approval, & dispatch workflows.

3× operational scalability, supporting growth from 850MT to 2500MT.

Higher data accuracy, lower operational risk

Offline-first field operations,
Uninterrupted purchasing in low-connectivity rural areas.

Reduced training and supervision dependency

Cause
Why this innovation was necessary

IIVL’s field procurement and logistics operations were entirely manual and paper-driven, involving :

  • Physical purchase slips

  • Handwritten UBC tracking

  • Manual approvals

  • Physical TLPV documents

  • Spreadsheet-based reconciliation

  • Phone calls between field agents, buyers, and warehouses

As procurement volumes grew, the system began to fail:

  • Purchase cycles took 4+ days

  • Paperwork was frequently misplaced or delayed

  • Errors surfaced only at dispatch or warehouse stages

  • Scaling operations meant scaling people and supervision, not efficiency

  • Zero real-time visibility for buyers and warehouses

  • Complete breakdowns in low-connectivity rural areas

  • Multi-day delays between purchase and approval

Digitisation was not a UX upgrade — it was an operational necessity to sustain growth.

Context
The reality we were designing for

Before proposing any solution, it was critical to understand the real operational environment, constraints, and stakeholders involved in field procurement and logistics.

To do this, I conducted stakeholder interviews, requirement gathering, and on-ground visits to Kurnool farms, shadowing field agents through their daily procurement workflows. This helped surface realities that process documents and improvement lists could not reveal.

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Key contextual constraints included:

  • Remote rural procurement with poor or no internet connectivity

  • Entire workflows dependent on manual paperwork and Excel sheets

  • SAP handling inventory and payments, but disconnected from field operations

  • Multiple handoffs across field agents, buyers, logistics, and warehouses

  • Scaling procurement from 850 MT to 2500 MT with the same manual setup

These constraints defined the boundaries within which any digital solution had to operate.

Context mapping revealed a critical insight:

Any digital system that depended on constant connectivity or memory-based training would fail in practice.

The design needed to absorb complexity, not expose it.

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As-Is procurement and approval flow highlighting manual dependencies, informal coordination, and late discovery of errors.

Comprehension 
Understanding the real problem

Focus was on understanding how work actually moved across people and stages.

Through contextual inquiry, shadowing, and user research, it became clear that the most complex and failure-prone part of the system was field procurement — where decisions were irreversible, connectivity was unreliable, and errors propagated downstream.

The deeper issues were not about missing features, but missing system intelligence:

  • Field agents rarely knew what state a task was in

  • Actions had consequences, but the system provided no feedback or guidance

  • Errors were discovered late, often during approval or reconciliation

  • Training depended on tribal knowledge and constant supervision

  • Progress relied more on people than on the process itself

Most steps worked not because of the system, but because of informal coordination:

  • “Rajesh knows how this works”

  • “Call the buyer to confirm”

  • “We’ll fix it during reconciliation”

Core Insight

The real opportunity was not just digitisation, but to design a system that:

Guides the field agent, enforces correctness, and makes progress visible at every step — even offline.

This insight directly shaped how workflows, states, and validations were later designed.

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Check
Validating feasibility and risk

Before designing interfaces, it was essential to validate whether the proposed system would actually survive real-world conditions.

Using early flow-level walkthroughs with field agents, buyers, and operations teams, I traced the end-to-end journey from purchase creation to approval, dispatch, and warehouse reconciliation.

These walkthroughs helped validate:

  • Where decisions truly occur vs. where they were assumed

  • Which actions must work offline

  • How duplicate submissions should be prevented

  • Where ownership should shift from humans to the system

  • What feedback users need when progress isn’t immediately visible

Early usability walkthroughs of proposed flows revealed hesitation points, reliance on verbal confirmation, and ambiguity around completion — directly informing later constraints and state-driven logic.

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Proposed User–System Interaction Flow Diagram

This diagram visualises how human roles and the application system interact, making ownership boundaries, decision points, and system responsibilities explicit before committing to UI design.

This artifact directly influenced:

  • State-driven workflows

  • Removal of repeated submission actions

  • Clear system feedback patterns

Conception
The core innovation idea

With a clear understanding of field constraints and failure points, the next step was to explore how the system could fundamentally change the way procurement worked — not just digitise existing steps.

The goal at this stage was divergence, not refinement.

How ideas were generated

I used structured ideation techniques to deliberately challenge legacy assumptions around procurement, approvals, and data entry. This ensured the solution didn’t inherit inefficiencies from the manual process.

Two techniques were central:

  • SCAMPER — to systematically rethink each part of the workflow

  • Worst Possible Idea — to surface hidden risks by imagining what would fail hardest in the field

These methods helped move thinking away from screens and forms toward system behavior, ownership, and flow design.

SCAMPER was used to challenge legacy procurement assumptions

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Used as a risk-identification tool to define what the system must explicitly prevent.

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Key directions that emerged

Across both exercises, a few strong directions consistently surfaced:

  • Replace free-text entry with QR scans, controlled inputs, and pre-filled data

  • Combine fragmented steps (scanning, receipt entry, validation) into single, guided flows

  • Shift error handling earlier in the process through inline validation

  • Reverse approval dynamics — enable correction over rejection

  • Design for offline-first execution, not as an edge case

  • Remove technical jargon to reduce training dependency

These ideas directly informed later decisions around state-driven workflows, role clarity, and irreversible action design.

Outcome of this phase

This phase produced a clear set of system principles and constraints that guided all subsequent flow design, validation logic, and offline behavior — before any screens were designed.

Crafting

Designing the system

With clear principles from Conception, the focus shifted to turning intent into executable workflows.
The goal was not visual polish, but to design flows that enforce correctness, reduce cognitive load, and work reliably in the field.

Crafting followed a deliberate progression: outcomes (what the system must guarantee) → flows (how responsibilities move) → interfaces (how users interact).

Defining intent with user stories

To align stakeholders on outcomes and constraints before designing interfaces, core requirements were captured using user stories.

These stories focused on what the system must guarantee for the Field Agent and downstream roles, especially under offline and high-risk conditions.

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These stories established system guarantees that later shaped flow sequencing & state logic.

Sequencing behavior through user flows

Once intent was clear, role-based user flows were created to define:

  • Action sequence

  • Ownership handoffs

  • Decision points

  • Irreversible steps

Four primary flows were designed, covering purchase, approval, shipment, and receipt.

Field Agent (Rajesh)

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Buyer (Kartik)

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Outbound Delivery Flow

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Warehouse Reconciliation flow

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Designing for real-world execution

Flows were translated into screens and prototypes with a strong emphasis on:

  • State visibility and guided progression

  • Offline-first behavior with clear feedback

  • Reduced input through scanning and pre-filled data

  • Simple, non-technical language to lower training dependency

UI designs and prototypes were iterated alongside lightweight usability walkthroughs to ensure clarity and confidence during execution.

Outcome of this phase

Crafting produced a cohesive, state-driven system that could be reliably executed in real-world field conditions and scaled with minimal training.

Wireframes

Low-Fi Screens

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Connection

Validation, Impact & Learnings

Validation

To ensure the solution worked beyond polished screens, I validated it in realistic field-like conditions.

I tested the prototype outdoors in bright sunlight to check visibility, contrast, and legibility, replicating the actual environments where procurement happens. I also walked colleagues and stakeholders through the end-to-end flows from a field agent’s perspective, simulating real tasks rather than demoing features.

User Testing

What testing revealed

  • Some steps felt confusing or longer than necessary due to vague or generic button labels.

  • Users were occasionally unsure what would happen next after completing an action.

  • The transition between UBC scanning and buying details felt slightly disjointed.

How the flows were refined

  • Replaced generic CTAs with clear, action-specific labels like “Submit for Approval” and “Upload Signed TLPV”.

  • Simplified navigation between scanning, data entry, and submission.

  • Reduced total steps and clicks by removing redundancy and clarifying system feedback.

Result: Users moved through the workflow with less hesitation, fewer errors, and higher confidence, especially during first-time use.

Results & Outcomes

The solution delivered measurable operational impact across procurement, approvals, and logistics:

  • 4× faster procurement cycle
    Reduced end-to-end turnaround from 4 days to 1 day.

  • 100% manual paperwork eliminated
    Digitized buying, approval, and dispatch workflows end-to-end.

  • 3× operational scalability
    Enabled procurement growth from 850 MT → 2500 MT without proportional headcount increase.

  • Higher data accuracy, lower operational risk
    QR-based validation reduced late-stage mismatches and corrections.

  • Offline-first field operations
    Ensured uninterrupted work in low-connectivity rural areas.

  • Reduced training & supervision dependency
    Simple, guided flows replaced tribal knowledge and constant oversight.

Key Learnings

This project reinforced that design is a system problem, not a screen problem.

  • Extreme context design matters
    Poor connectivity, harsh sunlight, dust, and high-volume operations must shape UI decisions from day one.

  • Structured creativity scales better than intuition
    Methods like SCAMPER and Worst Possible Idea helped convert constraints into strong, field-ready solutions.

  • Clients explain the “what,” users reveal the “why”
    Real insights came from observing workflows, not reading requirement documents.

  • K.I.S.S. wins in the field
    Simple language, large tap targets, and jargon-free UI significantly reduced errors and training effort.

  • Iteration is not optional
    Early validation and feedback loops prevented costly fixes later in the lifecycle.

Closing Note

By grounding decisions in real workflows, validating them early, and refining based on feedback, the system evolved from a digital replacement of paperwork into a reliable, scalable procurement and logistics platform.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"

"Aditya understood our goals, spoke with stakeholders, & turned everything into nice & easy flows. His designs made digitization possible."

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Naveen

Product Manager

"Earlier I write all in paper, carry so many sheets....Now its just scan in mobile and done. Work is much fast, less efforts."

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Ramesh Reddy

Field Agent

Story Time

This storyboarding section takes you on a dramatic journey through the procurement transformation, told through the eyes of two key characters :

  • Rajesh (The Field Agent): A hardworking man on the ground, battling heat, network failures, and manual paperwork, trying to keep up with increasing demands but constantly facing setbacks.

  • Kartik (The Buyer): An overwhelmed professional drowning in stacks of purchase records, struggling to approve shipments on time while dealing with endless errors and missing data.​​

As procurement demand triples, Kartik and Rajesh find themselves on the edge of complete breakdown—until a digital revolution turns things around.

The Procurement Revolution Story (1-9)

1.A System Stuck in the Past

In a world that demands speed, yesterday's methods are today's crisis

2.The Weight of Tradition

Are outdated processes holding you back?

3.Drowning in Paper

Trapped by Paperwork

4.The Breaking Point Call

Errors. Delays.

5.The Impossible Challenge

 FAILURE

6.The Solution is Born

Digitize. Modernize. Revolutionize.

7.The Digital Dawn

From Crisis to Control

8.Lightning Speed Approvals

Real-Time Data. Instant Approvals. Total Control.

ITC IIVL

The Future of Procurement.

Triumph and a New Beginning

That’s a Wrap

From farms to Figma—thanks for sticking around!​

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