Note: All data is mock and does not represent real production figures. Confidential details have been removed.

Volkswagen Group

Orchestrating Complexity: VW Supply Chain
Control Center

Product Format: Web application (Responsive)

Project Year: 2022 – Present

Business Partner: VW Group Procurement

Summary

To keep production on track across VW’s global plants, this enterprise web app focuses on early detection of part shortages. It enables buyers and logisticians to identify risks, trace root causes, and take action before shortages occur, by integrating the most relevant legacy and real-time supplier data into an intuitive interface.

Key challenges:

  • Cognitive overload from information-heavy screens
  • Tool carnivalism: fragmented, disconnected digital ecosystem
  • Blind spots in deep-tier supplier visibility

Product solutions:

  • Staged information diet, delivering the right data at the right time
  • Ecosystem orchestration by connecting other specialised tools via APIs, not reinventing them
  • N-Tier graph gisualisation of multi-tier part flows to uncover cause of issue

Company: OneSDC (Software Development Center) at VW Group IT

 

Team: UX UI Design Lead (myself), 6 FE/BE developers, PM and PO

Key Responsibilities:

  • User research and synthesis into insights
  • Customer journey and pain points
  • UX strategy and interface logic by team workshop facilitation
  • Stakeholder & Team alignment (POs,PM and Dev.)
  • Design system and Prototyping (ready for implementation)

What if enterprise tools were as intuitive as the apps we use every day — no matter how complex the workflow or data?

  1. Understand the Status Quo

When I joined Volkswagen, I stepped into a high-stakes automotive ecosystem: thirteen brands, hundreds of plants, and a global supply chain.

To truly understand the VW business environment and needs of our expert,we interviewed and shadowed 10 users across roles, brands, and regions to gain insight into their workflows and decision-making. I also facilitated a knowledge-sharing workshop to map the automotive value chain from order to delivery, uncover key systems in use, and identify relevant user roles.

Field research & user workshop

To gather diverse insights, we intentionally brought in 10 users from different environment and knowledge level.
We asked multiple questions about their daily process and digital and physical touch points in identifying part situation and shadowed their daily work over three days. Afterwards, we sat down and mapped their work processes and visualised the stakeholder map in Miro.

Stakeholder mapping

This stakeholder mapping exercise helped us clearly identify key roles - including actors, influencers, sponsors, and decision-makers. It also clarified which adjacent applications we needed to align with, based on the users’ toolchain.

 

As part of the Volkswagen digital ecosystem, we didn’t just focus on individual user tasks. We looked at their role within the broader end-to-end VW process.

→ This systems-level view helped us anticipate potential overlaps, reduce internal competition, and ensure a seamless experience across departments.

  1. Discovery & Framing

Based on our research, we synthesised and defined the MVP and product focus with persona, key user journey, and shortage calculation logic. These became the foundational framework for product shaping.

Focus Area: “Problem Detection”

We defined a clear focus use case within the broader bottleneck management process. We targeted the early stage, identifying part shortages, as our core scenario. This became the foundation and canvas for shaping our product ideas and design direction.

Challenge & Opportunities

We captured the core process of identifying shortage parts and clarified the users' primary goal: to detect shortages based on daily and weekly stock forecasts and quickly understand their root causes.

From there, we identified key challenges and explored possible solutions in collaboration with software architect and business partners. Through a series of cross-functional workshops, we surfaced three opportunity areas in high-level with clear potential for impact.

Challenge 1

Cognitive Overload: All information on one page creates distraction and prevents effective shortage identification

Challenge 2

Tool Carnivalism: Disconnected systems for shortage identification, problem solving, and reporting create silos and internal cannibalization

Challenge 3

Supply Chain Blind Spots: Missing external supplier information and tier relations obscure 80% of shortage root causes

Opportunity 1

Staged Information Diet: Divide workflow into three digestible pages—Global overview, Part details, and Bottleneck management

Opportunity 2

Ecosystem Orchestration: Provide API bridges to specialized tools instead of building everything, enabling seamless cross-platform workflows

Opportunity 3

N-tier Graph: Use graph visualization to reveal hidden part-specific supply chain relationships with BOM data

  1. Iterative Creation & Validation:
    UI Solution ↔️ User Testing

With clear product goals and feature ideas in place, we kicked off the most exciting (&iterative) phase - creation.

 

The challenge wasn’t just what to display, but how - defining the right information flow, behaviors, and priorities. Once the information architecture and user flows were mapped, I led the team through iterative design cycles:

 

  1. Define focus flow and key scenario
  2. Sketch quick mockups with the team (design, dev, and PM)
  3. Build high-fidelity prototypes to align with business stakeholders
  4. Refine concepts based on technical and business input
  5. Validate through user testing and behavioral analytics
  6. Iterate designs to address insights and improve usability

 

  1. Design Hand-shake

With clear product goals and feature ideas in place, we kicked off the most exciting (&iterative) phase - creation.

 

The challenge wasn’t just what to display, but how - defining the right information flow, behaviors, and priorities. Once the information architecture and user flows were mapped, I led the team through iterative design cycles:

 

  1. Define focus flow and key scenario
  2. Sketch quick mockups with the team (design, dev, and PM)
  3. Build high-fidelity prototypes to align with business stakeholders
  4. Refine concepts based on technical and business input
  5. Validate through user testing and behavioral analytics
  6. Iterate designs to address insights and improve usability

 

Figma → Phrase → Code

In collaboration with the development team, I defined a consistent naming convention. Keys were created and maintained by designers in context, enabling a seamless design-to-development workflow and significantly reducing developer time spent searching for the correct key-value pairs.

  1. The Outcome

Rather than aiming for a large-scale rollout, we started small - focusing on core functionality with immediate value. We initially deployed the software to a whitelist group of 50 VW brand employees and continuously validated our beta version through their feedback.

In the technical point of view, one of the major challenges was the lack of timely integration with external supply data. To move forward, we leveraged internal data, including demand, orders, deliveries, and stock, to calculate a reliable shortage forecast. This allowed us to launch the product while still delivering the essential value our users needed most.

Evaluation & Reflection

After 1.5 years of work, our product went live. After another year in 2024, together with the business team, we measured our business impact and user satisfaction via multiple channel and methods.

Business Impact

⏱️ Task completion time dropped from 12 mins 29seconds to 6 seconds for critical flows (e.g. finding Shipment note number)

Stakeholder Impact

👥 8000+ users onboarded across plants of 6 brands (Audi, SEAT, Skania, Porsche, VW, Skoda) with consistently positive adoption feedback

Organisational Impact

📜 As a new standard

The user insights and customer journey we explored and defined have since been adopted by other teams as organizational UX standards.

But more than the metrics, what I'm most proud of is this.
A buyer user tested our product and said,

I didn't think a tool like this could exist here. It feels like it was made by someone who actually understands my day.

That's when I realised we weren't just solving a usability problem but enhancing a fundamental disconnect between how people work and how systems were designed to support them.

This project taught me several important lessons:

🧩 “I need all the data” doesn’t mean “show me everything at once.”Users often ask for full visibility, but what they truly need is the right information, at the right time, for the task at hand. Structuring data visualisation contextually across steps allowed us to strike a balance between completeness and usability.

🧪 User testing must stay dynamic.
We had a long-standing test group, and over time, some users became too familiar with the product - overlooking friction points. Regularly onboarding fresh testers with no prior experience helped us catch issues that habitual users missed.

💬 Communication. Communication. Communication.
In enterprise design, collaboration is everything. Technical and business constraints, from legacy process to compliance policies. often limit what we can change. That’s why I treat open communication as a core part of design. Proactively aligning with developers and business teams helped surface constraints early, fostered shared ownership, and eliminated unnecessary blockers before they became issues.

All Rights Reserved

Note: All data is mock and does not represent real production figures. Confidential details have been removed.

Volkswagen Group

Orchestrating Complexity: VW Supply Chain
Control Center

Product Format: Web application (Responsive)

Project Year: 2022 – Present

Business Partner: VW Group Procurement

Summary

To keep production on track across VW’s global plants, this enterprise web app focuses on early detection of part shortages. It enables buyers and logisticians to identify risks, trace root causes, and take action before shortages occur, by integrating the most relevant legacy and real-time supplier data into an intuitive interface.

Key challenges:

  • Cognitive overload from information-heavy screens
  • Tool carnivalism: fragmented, disconnected digital ecosystem
  • Blind spots in deep-tier supplier visibility

Product solutions:

  • Staged information diet, delivering the right data at the right time
  • Ecosystem orchestration by connecting other specialised tools via APIs, not reinventing them
  • N-Tier graph gisualisation of multi-tier part flows to uncover cause of issue

Company: OneSDC (Software Development Center) at VW Group IT

 

Team: UX UI Design Lead (myself), 6 FE/BE developers, PM and PO

Key Responsibilities:

  • User research and synthesis into insights
  • Customer journey and pain points
  • UX strategy and interface logic by team workshop facilitation
  • Stakeholder & Team alignment (POs,PM and Dev.)
  • Design system and Prototyping (ready for implementation)

What if enterprise tools were as intuitive as the apps we use every day — no matter how complex the workflow or data?

  1. Understand the Status Quo

When I joined Volkswagen, I stepped into a high-stakes automotive ecosystem: thirteen brands, hundreds of plants, and a global supply chain.

To truly understand the VW business environment and needs of our expert,we interviewed and shadowed 10 users across roles, brands, and regions to gain insight into their workflows and decision-making. I also facilitated a knowledge-sharing workshop to map the automotive value chain from order to delivery, uncover key systems in use, and identify relevant user roles.

Field research & user workshop

To gather diverse insights, we intentionally brought in 10 users from different environment and knowledge level.
We asked multiple questions about their daily process and digital and physical touch points in identifying part situation and shadowed their daily work over three days. Afterwards, we sat down and mapped their work processes and visualised the stakeholder map in Miro.

Stakeholder mapping

This stakeholder mapping exercise helped us clearly identify key roles - including actors, influencers, sponsors, and decision-makers. It also clarified which adjacent applications we needed to align with, based on the users’ toolchain.

 

As part of the Volkswagen digital ecosystem, we didn’t just focus on individual user tasks. We looked at their role within the broader end-to-end VW process.

→ This systems-level view helped us anticipate potential overlaps, reduce internal competition, and ensure a seamless experience across departments.

  1. Discovery & Framing

Based on our research, we synthesised and defined the MVP and product focus with persona, key user journey, and shortage calculation logic. These became the foundational framework for product shaping.

Focus Area: “Problem Detection”

We defined a clear focus use case within the broader bottleneck management process. We targeted the early stage, identifying part shortages, as our core scenario. This became the foundation and canvas for shaping our product ideas and design direction.

Challenge & Opportunities

We captured the core process of identifying shortage parts and clarified the users' primary goal: to detect shortages based on daily and weekly stock forecasts and quickly understand their root causes.

From there, we identified key challenges and explored possible solutions in collaboration with software architect and business partners. Through a series of cross-functional workshops, we surfaced three opportunity areas in high-level with clear potential for impact.

Challenge 1

Cognitive Overload: All information on one page creates distraction and prevents effective shortage identification

Challenge 2

Tool Carnivalism: Disconnected systems for shortage identification, problem solving, and reporting create silos and internal cannibalization

Challenge 3

Supply Chain Blind Spots: Missing external supplier information and tier relations obscure 80% of shortage root causes

Opportunity 1

Staged Information Diet: Divide workflow into three digestible pages—Global overview, Part details, and Bottleneck management

Opportunity 2

Ecosystem Orchestration: Provide API bridges to specialized tools instead of building everything, enabling seamless cross-platform workflows

Opportunity 3

N-tier Graph: Use graph visualization to reveal hidden part-specific supply chain relationships with BOM data

  1. Iterative Creation & Validation:
    UI Solution ↔️ User Testing

With clear product goals and feature ideas in place, we kicked off the most exciting (&iterative) phase - creation.

 

The challenge wasn’t just what to display, but how - defining the right information flow, behaviors, and priorities. Once the information architecture and user flows were mapped, I led the team through iterative design cycles:

 

  1. Define focus flow and key scenario
  2. Sketch quick mockups with the team (design, dev, and PM)
  3. Build high-fidelity prototypes to align with business stakeholders
  4. Refine concepts based on technical and business input
  5. Validate through user testing and behavioral analytics
  6. Iterate designs to address insights and improve usability

 

  1. Design Hand-shake

With clear product goals and feature ideas in place, we kicked off the most exciting (&iterative) phase - creation.

 

The challenge wasn’t just what to display, but how - defining the right information flow, behaviors, and priorities. Once the information architecture and user flows were mapped, I led the team through iterative design cycles:

 

  1. Define focus flow and key scenario
  2. Sketch quick mockups with the team (design, dev, and PM)
  3. Build high-fidelity prototypes to align with business stakeholders
  4. Refine concepts based on technical and business input
  5. Validate through user testing and behavioral analytics
  6. Iterate designs to address insights and improve usability

 

Figma → Phrase → Code

In collaboration with the development team, I defined a consistent naming convention. Keys were created and maintained by designers in context, enabling a seamless design-to-development workflow and significantly reducing developer time spent searching for the correct key-value pairs.

  1. The Outcome

Rather than aiming for a large-scale rollout, we started small - focusing on core functionality with immediate value. We initially deployed the software to a whitelist group of 50 VW brand employees and continuously validated our beta version through their feedback.

In the technical point of view, one of the major challenges was the lack of timely integration with external supply data. To move forward, we leveraged internal data, including demand, orders, deliveries, and stock, to calculate a reliable shortage forecast. This allowed us to launch the product while still delivering the essential value our users needed most.

Evaluation & Reflection

After 1.5 years of work, our product went live. After another year in 2024, together with the business team, we measured our business impact and user satisfaction via multiple channel and methods.

Business Impact

⏱️ Task completion time dropped from 12 mins 29seconds to 6 seconds for critical flows (e.g. finding Shipment note number)

Stakeholder Impact

👥 8000+ users onboarded across plants of 6 brands (Audi, SEAT, Skania, Porsche, VW, Skoda) with consistently positive adoption feedback

Organisational Impact

📜 As a new standard

The user insights and customer journey we explored and defined have since been adopted by other teams as organizational UX standards.

But more than the metrics, what I'm most proud of is this.
A buyer user tested our product and said,

I didn't think a tool like this could exist here. It feels like it was made by someone who actually understands my day.

That's when I realised we weren't just solving a usability problem but enhancing a fundamental disconnect between how people work and how systems were designed to support them.

This project taught me several important lessons:

🧩 “I need all the data” doesn’t mean “show me everything at once.”Users often ask for full visibility, but what they truly need is the right information, at the right time, for the task at hand. Structuring data visualisation contextually across steps allowed us to strike a balance between completeness and usability.

🧪 User testing must stay dynamic.
We had a long-standing test group, and over time, some users became too familiar with the product - overlooking friction points. Regularly onboarding fresh testers with no prior experience helped us catch issues that habitual users missed.

💬 Communication. Communication. Communication.
In enterprise design, collaboration is everything. Technical and business constraints, from legacy process to compliance policies. often limit what we can change. That’s why I treat open communication as a core part of design. Proactively aligning with developers and business teams helped surface constraints early, fostered shared ownership, and eliminated unnecessary blockers before they became issues.

All Rights Reserved

Note: All data is mock and does not represent real production figures. Confidential details have been removed.

Volkswagen Group

Orchestrating Complexity: VW Supply Chain
Control Center

Product Format: Web application (Responsive)

Project Year: 2022 – Present

Business Partner: VW Group Procurement

Summary

To keep production on track across VW’s global plants, this enterprise web app focuses on early detection of part shortages. It enables buyers and logisticians to identify risks, trace root causes, and take action before shortages occur, by integrating the most relevant legacy and real-time supplier data into an intuitive interface.

Key challenges:

  • Cognitive overload from information-heavy screens
  • Tool carnivalism: fragmented, disconnected digital ecosystem
  • Blind spots in deep-tier supplier visibility

Product solutions:

  • Staged information diet, delivering the right data at the right time
  • Ecosystem orchestration by connecting other specialised tools via APIs, not reinventing them
  • N-Tier graph visualisation of multi-tier part flows to uncover cause of issue

Company: OneSDC (Software Development Center) at VW Group IT

 

Team: UX UI Design Lead (myself), 6 FE/BE developers, PM and PO

Key Responsibilities:

  • User research and synthesis into insights
  • Customer journey and pain points
  • UX strategy and interface logic by team workshop facilitation
  • Stakeholder & Team alignment (POs,PM and Dev.)
  • Design system and Prototyping (ready for implementation)

What if enterprise tools were as intuitive as the apps we use every day — no matter how complex the workflow or data?

  1. Understand the Status Quo

When I joined Volkswagen, I stepped into a high-stakes automotive ecosystem: thirteen brands, hundreds of plants, and a global supply chain.

To truly understand the VW business environment and needs of our expert,we interviewed and shadowed 10 users across roles, brands, and regions to gain insight into their workflows and decision-making. I also facilitated a knowledge-sharing workshop to map the automotive value chain from order to delivery, uncover key systems in use, and identify relevant user roles.

Field research & user workshop

To gather diverse insights, we intentionally brought in 10 users from different environment and knowledge level.
We asked multiple questions about their daily process and digital and physical touch points in identifying part situation and shadowed their daily work over three days. Afterwards, we sat down and mapped their work processes and visualised the stakeholder map in Miro.

Stakeholder mapping

This stakeholder mapping exercise helped us clearly identify key roles - including actors, influencers, sponsors, and decision-makers. It also clarified which adjacent applications we needed to align with, based on the users’ toolchain.

 

As part of the Volkswagen digital ecosystem, we didn’t just focus on individual user tasks. We looked at their role within the broader end-to-end VW process.

→ This systems-level view helped us anticipate potential overlaps, reduce internal competition, and ensure a seamless experience across departments.

  1. Discovery & Framing

Based on our research, we synthesised and defined the MVP and product focus with persona, key user journey, and shortage calculation logic. These became the foundational framework for product shaping.

Focus Area: “Problem Detection”

We defined a clear focus use case within the broader bottleneck management process. We targeted the early stage, identifying part shortages, as our core scenario.

Challenge & Opportunities

We captured the core process of identifying shortage parts and clarified the users' primary goal: to detect shortages based on daily and weekly stock forecasts and quickly understand their root causes.

From there, we identified key challenges and explored possible solutions in collaboration with software architect and business partners. Through a series of cross-functional workshops, we surfaced three opportunity areas in high-level with clear potential for impact.

Challenge 1

Cognitive Overload: All information on one page creates distraction and prevents effective shortage identification

Challenge 2

Tool Carnivalism: Disconnected systems for shortage identification, problem solving, and reporting create silos and internal cannibalization

Challenge 3

Supply Chain Blind Spots: Missing external supplier information and tier relations obscure 80% of shortage root causes

Opportunity 1

Staged Information Diet: Divide workflow into three digestible pages—Global overview, Part details, and Bottleneck management

Opportunity 2

Ecosystem Orchestration: Provide API bridges to specialized tools instead of building everything, enabling seamless cross-platform workflows

Opportunity 3

N-tier Graph: Use graph visualization to reveal hidden part-specific supply chain relationships with BOM data

  1. Iterative Creation & Validation:
    UI Solution ↔️ User Testing

With clear product goals and feature ideas in place, we kicked off the most exciting (&iterative) phase - creation.

 

The challenge wasn’t just what to display, but how - defining the right information flow, behaviors, and priorities. Once the information architecture and user flows were mapped, I led the team through iterative design cycles:

 

  1. Define focus flow and key scenario
  2. Sketch quick mockups with the team (design, dev, and PM)
  3. Build high-fidelity prototypes to align with business stakeholders
  4. Refine concepts based on technical and business input
  5. Validate through user testing and behavioral analytics
  6. Iterate designs to address insights and improve usability

 

  1. Design Hand-shake

With clear product goals and feature ideas in place, we kicked off the most exciting (&iterative) phase - creation.

 

The challenge wasn’t just what to display, but how - defining the right information flow, behaviors, and priorities. Once the information architecture and user flows were mapped, I led the team through iterative design cycles:

 

  1. Define focus flow and key scenario
  2. Sketch quick mockups with the team (design, dev, and PM)
  3. Build high-fidelity prototypes to align with business stakeholders
  4. Refine concepts based on technical and business input
  5. Validate through user testing and behavioral analytics
  6. Iterate designs to address insights and improve usability

 

Figma → Phrase → Code

In collaboration with the development team, I defined a consistent naming convention. Keys were created and maintained by designers in context, enabling a seamless design-to-development workflow and significantly reducing developer time spent searching for the correct key-value pairs.

  1. The Outcome

Rather than aiming for a large-scale rollout, we started small - focusing on core functionality with immediate value. We initially deployed the software to a whitelist group of 50 VW brand employees and continuously validated our beta version through their feedback.

In the technical point of view, one of the major challenges was the lack of timely integration with external supply data. To move forward, we leveraged internal data, including demand, orders, deliveries, and stock, to calculate a reliable shortage forecast. This allowed us to launch the product while still delivering the essential value our users needed most.

Evaluation & Reflection

After 1.5 years of development, our product went live and has gradually onboarded over 8,000 users across six VW Group brands.

Usability testing and feedback from business partners suggested that our solution performed well in comparison to external alternatives, with especially shorter task times as one of the key improvements.

Our user research approach in the logistics and procurement domain was also positively received and later referenced by other internal product teams.

Business Impact

⏱️ Task completion time dropped from 12 mins 29seconds to 6 seconds for critical flows (e.g. finding Shipment note number)

Stakeholder Impact

👥 8000+ users onboarded across plants of 6 brands (Audi, SEAT, Skania, Porsche, VW, Skoda) with consistently positive adoption feedback

Organisational Impact

📜 As a new standard

The user insights and customer journey we explored and defined have since been adopted by other teams as organizational UX standards.

But more than the metrics, what I'm most proud of is this.
A buyer user tested our product and said,

I didn't think a tool like this could exist here. It feels like it was made by someone who actually understands my day.

That's when I realised we weren't just solving a usability problem but enhancing a fundamental disconnect between how people work and how systems were designed to support them.

This project taught me several important lessons:

🧩 “I need all the data” doesn’t mean “show me everything at once.”Users often ask for full visibility, but what they truly need is the right information, at the right time, for the task at hand. Structuring data visualisation contextually across steps allowed us to strike a balance between completeness and usability.

🧪 User testing must stay dynamic.
We had a long-standing test group, and over time, some users became too familiar with the product - overlooking friction points. Regularly onboarding fresh testers with no prior experience helped us catch issues that habitual users missed.

💬 Communication. Communication. Communication.
In enterprise design, collaboration is everything. Technical and business constraints, from legacy process to compliance policies. often limit what we can change. That’s why I treat open communication as a core part of design. Proactively aligning with developers and business teams helped surface constraints early, fostered shared ownership, and eliminated unnecessary blockers before they became issues.

All Rights Reserved