Supplier Onboarding Redesign

Improved onboarding time from 12 weeks to 1 week

Walmart’s supplier onboarding experience was a Frankenstein product developed over 20+ years by 10+ different teams, and impacted both Store and Online suppliers. The NPS was -40 from both Suppliers and internal Associates.Onboarding times averaged 12 weeks, with some cases extending beyond 6 months. A comprehensive overhaul of the process was urgently required to address these inefficiencies.

From Pain-points to Scopes

The chart below demonstrates how disjointed it technically and visually feels in the old onboarding experience.

We had learned from 30+ interviews with suppliers and business stakeholders that the main pain-points were: 1. Disjointed experience, 2. Lengthy process with outdated design & technology, and 3. No efficient communication tools, which helps us to scope MVP:

Scope 1: Reduce Hurdles In Onboarding

Solution 1: Consistent Header
Inconsistency was caused by a combination of legacy technical and design debts. While technical fixes required time, a quick win was implementing a global header for consistent branding & corresponding actions.

Solution 2: Reorganize Tasks/Steps
We split the previous “Basic Info” to two tasks: “Company Info” and “Tax Info” - due to Tax taking the most of time, and then reorganized other tasks for better flow and grouping.

Solution 3: UI Redesign
The new card UI with clearer explanations empowers suppliers to "choose their path," giving them greater control over the process.

Solution 4: Tax Form Automation
Tax step was responsible for 50% of onboarding time and 80% of complaint tickets. We fully automated the tax forms and dedicated a month to QA, including a sprint to test 26 scenarios for W8-BEN-N tax forms.

Scope 2: Provide Profile Maintenance Guidance

Problems
Changes to certain fields in Company or Tax Info require sequential updates to re-generate tax documents.
The old tool lacked clear guidance, creating critical business hurdles.

Solution
We engaged engineers early to address technical constraints, resulting in a collaborative solution aligning product and tech needs. Below shows the iteration process for the instruction modal driven by engineers’ inputs.

Final design details: A sticky modal with a sequential checklist handheld suppliers through all required steps.

Scope 3: New Communication Tool

Problem
The old UI was so unclear that suppliers required a step-by-step PDF tutorial, and associates had to manually gather issue details and documents for follow-ups.

Solution
We investigated all emails sent to suppliers during the onboarding and categorized the most common issues are reorganized into 4 task types (see the image below). Each task type has corresponding actions for Associate to act.

When a task is triggered, Supplier will receive an email notification and clicking the email leads Supplier back to Retail Link’s Notification Center where all tasks and messages. If a further communication is needed, Walmart Associate can initiate a message from the task screen and the task will be automatically associated in the message UI. All participants can easily learn the context within a click.

Outcomes

Supplier Onboarding
1. The onboarding time was reduced from 12 weeks to 1 week.
2. NPS was improved from -40 to +80.
3. The complaint tickets related to onboarding decreased ~40%.

Internal Associate
The new internal supplier administration tool AMA (Agreement Management Application) improved the Walmart US associate NPS from -40 to +50.

Additional Responsibilities

Design Process & Culture
1. Set up weekly design team sync, and bi-weekly design review with PMs & Team Leads
3. Managed design JIRA board for efficient project processes
3. Regular design walkthrough with Engineering before the project kickoff
4. Partnered with PMs for monthly design walkthrough with Business stakeholders
5. Led design QA in the sprint demo

Design Leadership
1. Coordinated with Design System team to contribute new components and planned for the upcoming company-wide rebranding
2. Drove cross-team alignment by rapid prototyping
3. Mentored and hired junior designers