Experience Design Lead for the Product Information Management solution that manages vital aspects of the beautiful Swisscom «Campus» Shops.
Swisscom PIM Tool
Concept
The market’s foreseeable pivot to an All-IP world around 2010 required Swisscom to rethink its own shops. The result were – and still are – the Human Centered Designed Swisscom «Campus» Shops (YouTube Video walkthrough in Swiss German here).
They came with their own set of challenges and required us to conceive a new PIM Tool (codename P.I.M.P.) that could manage all of the Shops’ portfolios, communications, visual merchandising, furniture, and logistics information and processes.
In this new kind of Swisscom Shop, everything is information that needs to be managed on a timeline. And lots of specialists will be using the tool – Shop Designers, Shop Builders, Product Managers, Marketing Managers, Shop Managers, Printers, Logistics and many more.
To spice things up: shop floor plans are individual per locale and different shop sizes get different product portfolios, different promotions etc.
The following story explains some of the concepts, using my initial concept wireframes that provided the «DNA» for the project, its 300+ page spec and 1 year development and implementation phase.
Overall process (simplified)
Architects and Shop Designers start by placing furniture in the PIM’s 2D environment. Product portfolios created by Product Managers are linked to furniture types and sizes which automatically maps them to the shop.
Same principle applies for all means of communication. Simply placing them in a layout makes them available to Marketing Managers’ campaign planning and adds them to production lists for Printers, delivery lists for logistics and Chalkboard Templates for the shops’ Creative Specialists.
Marketing Managers plan their Marketing and Visual Merchandising campaigns in the tool, as well. These can even have mixed timelines and be applied for an individual selection of shops for localized marketing efforts.
The accompanying mobile app provides a perfect way to communicate updates to shop managers, tell them where to place new products or promotions – and gather their feedbacks.
Deep dive: Price Tags
The «Campus» Price Tags are a perfect way to show you (in a superficial way) how deep the concept phase for the Swisscom PIM Tool went.
The price tags (which I also designed) are threefold – they have a front providing marketing information, a back providing price plan information, and a third element containing pricing information. They can feature promotional information. They can be torn off to help a customer’s memory and increase sales probability (thank you, Paco Underhill). And they’re directly linked to the shop portfolio lifecycle.
They are designed within the same PIM tool, using an HTML editor and an API to an external marketing agency which provides their content & ratings.
As price tags are linked to the product portfolio, their update process and physical production had to be organized this way.
And subsequent per shop logistics had to be organized this way.
And there was the question – Product Management and Marketing Managers, who does what.
This was just one example for the manifold processes that needed to be designed in order to make the shops work in the everyday.
The tool allowed (and still allows) for the shops to function in an efficient way while providing Swisscom with a tools that helps them realize their vision of shops that are true «Companions in the Digital World».
Contributions
- Experience Design Lead
- Service Design
- Quality Assurance
- Training
- Visual Design
