🧠 Case Study: Customer Mars Operating System (CMOS)

Client: Mars, Inc. (via Mu Sigma)
Role: UX Research & Design
Duration: April 2020 – September 2020
Location: Bangalore, India (Remote collaboration with teams in Nashville & London)
Project Type: Enterprise Application | Supply Chain Optimization
Tools Used: Figma, Mural, Optimal Workshop, Jira, Confluence, Office 365

🌀 The Design Process

I followed a six-phase, iterative design approach—rooted in user-centered principles—to tackle complexity, bring alignment across roles, and deliver measurable impact.

🔹 Understand → 🔹 Research → 🔹 Ideate → 🔹 Pre-design → 🔹 Test → 🔹 Re-design

🔍 Project Overview

The Customer Mars Operating System (CMOS) was envisioned as a single source of truth for inventory planning, customer order fulfillment, and cross-team collaboration at Mars, Inc. The challenge? Legacy Excel-based processes had become cumbersome, inconsistent, and opaque.

This project aimed to replace manual workflows with a digital operating system that empowered teams with real-time insights, transparency, and customer-centric tools.

🚩 The Problem

Sales, Supply Chain, Availability, and Customer Relations teams were making high-impact decisions daily—without shared visibility, centralized data, or aligned workflows. These silos resulted in:

• Increased stockouts and customer escalations

• Delayed communication of risks and promotion gaps

• Fragmented tooling with little context sharing

🎯 Project Goals

• Build a unified platform for decision-making and coordination

• Improve visibility into inventory, risks, and customer commitments

• Reduce Excel dependence and manual effort

• Empower Sales teams with proactive risk insights

👥 User Research

I conducted remote interviews with cross-functional stakeholders across the US and UK to understand their goals, workflows, and frustrations.

Key Questions Explored:

• What are your daily goals related to customer orders?

• How do you make inventory or promotion-related decisions?

• What tools do you currently rely on, and where do they fail you?

• How do you communicate risks internally and externally?
  

🧠 Insight: Teams weren’t lacking intent—they were lacking aligned systems. Risk was managed reactively due to information gaps.

🧩 Defining the Opportunity

From interviews and task analysis, I mapped the core pain points into actionable needs:

• Real-time visibility into upcoming customer risks

• Shared timelines for promotions and orders

• A lightweight tool to replace scattered spreadsheets

• Role-based views of inventory and customer status

💡 I distilled this into a unified experience framework called "The CARE Way":

Concern → Accountability → Resolution → Execution

This structured the product around how teams naturally respond to customer risks.

🧠 Ideation & Task Modeling

Working with product stakeholders, I mapped out task flows for each role. We prioritized:

• Escalation handling

• Alternative item recommendations

• Promotion tracking

• Actionable KPIs

Instead of building features first, I focused on goal-driven flows—matching the real-world behaviors of CMOS, Sales, and Availability teams.

✍️ Low-Fidelity Design

We began sketching and whiteboarding scenarios to visualize potential screens. This helped uncover early edge cases and gain alignment with engineering.

• Created early IA drafts based on task flow priorities

• Designed low-fidelity wireframes for quick validation

• Applied progressive disclosure principles to show only the data users needed at each stage

✅ Usability Testing

Moderated sessions were conducted with 7 key users across roles. We gave them real scenarios and watched them navigate early prototypes.

Findings:

• Users struggled with navigation hierarchy

• Needed clearer escalation triggers

• Missed cross-role context in overview screens

🗂️ Card Sorting + IA Refinement

To improve flow clarity and discoverability, I conducted open and hybrid card sorts. This informed a simplified, role-aligned information architecture.

Updated IA reflected:

• Role-specific dashboards

• Clearly grouped risks, actions, and items

• A single place to see promotion status and customer impact

🎨 Design & Prototyping

With validation in place, I designed high-fidelity prototypes for key user flows, including:

• Dashboard with KPIs and urgent items

• Risk entry and escalation workflows

• Promotion calendar with real-time tracking

• Customer communication templates

🚀 Outcomes

The redesigned system brought measurable improvements across key metrics:

✅ +94% improvement in accurate data on-hand
✅ –76% reduction in tools used for daily tasks
✅ +17% increase in alternative item acceptance
✅ –12% reduction in customer order cuts
✅ +2 days lead in risk identification
✅ –35% faster access to critical data

📚 Key Learnings

This was my first end-to-end UX research-led transformation in an enterprise supply chain domain. I:

• Built trust with global stakeholders remotely

• Educated cross-functional partners on UX value

• Saw firsthand how aligning with real user goals beats feature-first thinking

💬 Feedback Snapshot

"This is the first time we feel the tool is built for how we work—not the other way around."
— Sales Lead, Mars US