P Product
Transportation Planning Products
A set of planning and order-creation capabilities developed to make seasonal and promotional execution more consistent, explainable, and scalable.
Type
Product
Core Competency
Product Operations
250+
business partners reached
$5M+
supply chain savings
17%
on-time delivery improvement
$100M+
delivery risk mitigated
6.6K
annual planning hours saved
Context or Challenge
Manual planning and order creation created cost, delivery variability, repeated coordination, and inconsistent decision-making across complex seasonal programs.
Observation
Users were relying on workarounds and individual expertise because a standard planning experience did not exist.
Insight
The highest-value opportunity was to understand the decisions users made repeatedly, validate the underlying pain points, and turn that knowledge into a repeatable workflow.
My Thinking
I used user research and voice-of-customer feedback to define the problem, tested an MVP with business partners, refined the workflow through validation, and scaled the solution only after it proved useful.
What I Built or Led
I built and validated an MVP that standardized core planning and order-creation activities, then scaled the capabilities to more than 250 business partners before transitioning the mature solution to a Product organization. One representative example, ICC Flow Builder, shows what that standardization looked like in practice.
Featured Capability: ICC Flow Builder
- Replaced manual, all-at-once seasonal purchase-order submission with a self-service tool built around a 4-wave, lead-time-based staggering model
- Automated the underlying data refresh on a twice-daily cycle, so routing logic always reflected current lead times instead of a static, aging spreadsheet
- Consolidated routing, wave planning, and export preparation into one browser-based workflow, removing manual staggering calculations for planners
- Reached 30+ daily active users as a self-service planning tool within the broader transportation planning portfolio
Technology Behind the Tool
- JavaScript
- Python (Flask)
- SQL-based data warehouse integration
- Automated twice-daily data pipeline
- Greedy, constraint-based scheduling algorithm
- Automated test coverage (unit + end-to-end)
- Enterprise single sign-on
- Containerized cloud deployment
How It Works, Behind the Scenes
In general terms, the tool checks whether a shipment's volume is large enough to fill a truck straight to its destination. If so, it ships direct. If not, the remaining volume is consolidated, grouped into one of four lead-time-based waves, and its order dates are smoothed across several days so volume doesn't spike on any single day. That smoothing step runs on a greedy, constraint-based scheduling algorithm: it sorts shipments by target date and assigns each one to the earliest day that still has capacity, so no single day gets overloaded. An automated data refresh runs continuously in the background, keeping the lead-time and routing data behind these decisions current -- so the logic never depends on a static, aging spreadsheet.
Launch or Adoption Strategy
The rollout used business-partner validation, structured feedback, workflow documentation, enablement content, and a transition plan for long-term product ownership. ICC Flow Builder itself was ultimately handed off at the enterprise level for direct integration into Walmart's ordering systems, moving it from a standalone planning aid into a connected step in the order-creation pipeline.
Business Impact
- More than 250 business partners reached
- $5M+ in supply chain savings
- 17% improvement in on-time delivery
- $100M+ in delivery risk mitigated
- 6.6K annual planning hours saved
- Enterprise handoff: ICC Flow Builder's routing and export output was adopted for direct integration into Walmart's ordering systems, embedding its logic into the broader order-creation pipeline rather than remaining a standalone tool
Key Takeaway
“Strong products often begin by standardizing a decision that users are already trying to make through manual workarounds.”
Capabilities Demonstrated
- Voice of customer
- MVP validation
- Product operations
- Workflow automation
- Requirements definition
- Adoption
- Product transition
- Risk mitigation
- Operational transformation
- Full-stack tool direction
- Cross-functional partnership with engineering