Sime Darby Scalable Unified Platform

The Challenge

Sime Darby currently has several staff portals for each subsidiary company , serving its 30,000 employees across the world. As the company grew, multiple delivery teams adapted and diverged. This resulted in disparate, difficult to maintain sites, with features and behaviors functioning in different ways.

The digital transformation team has put forward a scalable unified platform  solution. Adopting this solution enables the team to quickly replicate the  experience across the subsidiary companies, switching the themes easily and switching on the desired widgets.

The unified platform provides a rich API layer allowing integration with third party systems easily and enabling scaling of applications throughout Sime Darby. With this approach, data duplication is minimised, time to market is significantly improved, development and operation costs are reduced.

Portals

• Sime Darby (Done)
• Hastings Deering (in progress)
• Terra Cat (on hold)
• Tractors Singapore (on hold)
• Tractors Malaysia (on hold)
• Sime Darby Motors Group (on hold)
• China Engineers Ltd (on hold)

Role
Senior UX/UI Designer

Platform
Contentful

Project Management
Agile Scrum Methodology

Tools
Figma, Figma Token, Design System, User Testing, Hotjar, UX/UI Design and Research, Adobe Suite

Prototype

The Process

After consulting with the stakeholders, the project was split into sixteen sections and were prioritised by the product owner and myself. Each section was based on utilising Lean UX principles which was to incorporate key phases of Discovery, Reseaech, Ideation and Implementation.

Gathering Insights

There are several ways to gather insights and these are the following I’ve approach for the initial discovery:

1. Employee Journey – understanding what our employees are experiencing and emphatise with them
2. Workshops – Conduct workshops to understand employees perspective
3. Analytics – Reviewing GA & Power BI results base on the last 6 months data collected.

My research encompassed:

• Understanding the business goals and user needs
• Uncovering pain points with the existing user journey

Analytics data gathering and Workshop with employees to gather insights

Workshops

My process with each section was based on the following Lean UX process which was to incorporate the key phases of Discovery, Research, Ideation and Implementation.

The project was split into sections and being priotise accordingly base on value. As a team we can deliver each section for the developers to work in parallel thus speeding up the whole process.

In order to effectively facilitate the workshops, we guided our employees with appropriate and meaningful activities through sketching and presentations. Keeping the discussions on track and empowering employees to think about ideas and validating expectations were valuable

All of the activities led to fruitful outcomes which gave focus and direction to the important ideas. With these findings I embarked on several design iterations with my team again to evolve the design from sketchs to low fidelity wireframes

4 sketching iterations before commencing low fidelity stage wireframe

High Fidelity Prototypes

Based on the research and workshop insights, I worked towards addressing employees pains by coming up with potential solutions:

• Reducing the number of steps to minimise time to completion (IA Improvement)
• Auto-Complete content as much as possible
• Establishing clearer visual form hierarchy by grouping related fields
• Standardisation styling and UI to keep the portal wholesome
• Role base utilitarian tools

Prototypes went through several rounds of critique and user validation

Development Stage

After the prototypes were user validated, I worked cohesively with the development team to launch the design up on UAT environment before beta release. In order for functionality and design to be accurately represented as per design, teamwork and effective communication was crucial

Final product delivered to the business and we continue building for the subsidiary companies.

Next Steps

I have been preparing for the product launch, collaborating with our change team to prepared for the new features rollout within the app and presentations to be conducted to all levels within the company. So far this has been successful with overwhelming positive feedbacks across the company.

Beta release is scheduled for July . We are gearing up for more constructive feedbacks and GA results to understand user behavior to bring forth to our next UX improvement.