Secondary research 📚
I started off by googling about what exactly goes around with the inventory management of a medical store by reading blogs, articles and research paper to validate our initial assumptions.
If you count all your assets you always show a profit — Wilson Mizner
Inventory management is defined as the continuing process of planning, organizing and controlling inventory that aims at minimizing the investment in inventory while balancing supply and demand.
There are three methods used in pharmacy to manage inventory: the visual method, the periodic method, and the perpetual method. Out of which the perpetual inventory management method is the most common and efficient method to manage pharmacy inventory. It involves a computerized system that monitors the inventory at all times on a continuous systematic basis.
In this system, the inventory is manually entered into the computer software, and the appropriate amount of products is automatically reduced from the inventory when a prescription or medication order is filled.
Primary research 🔍
We could interview only 3 pharmacists over a call because of the pandemic situation, over the interview we asked them for their daily tasks inventory management.
The interview helped us understand the user needs and pain points even better.
A few still use old school pen paper techniques to manage their inventory but most of them shifted to a digital platform.
The pharmacists experienced trouble by manually entering the medicines sold onto their computers in order to manage the inventory.
The pharmacists experience trouble when medicine goes out of stock and causes discomfort to the customer.
The pharmacists experience trouble while keeping track of the ordered inventory and while making the monthly/annual sales report.
This helped us create the User Persona and also list down the points for the Minimum Viable Product.
Wireframes 🎞
Once the user flow and IA was done, with the help of that we moved to Wireframing. We used Figma to make low fidelity wireframes. This was a time consuming process as it required constant changes according to the feedback we kept getting from our mentors.
Visual Design 😍
Now that we were satisfied with our wireframes we moved on to making the UIs in Figma. We first came up with a design system, where we made a color palette that fits the product and decided to work with DM sans as the font.
Color Scheme
Authentication pages
The sign up and login pages were kept very simple and only the necessary information from the pharmacists was collected. We gave an option to either login through email or through google account.
Login/ SIgn up pages
We also made a forgot password page so that recovering the account remains easy for the uses.
Forgot password page
Dashboard
Gives a quick insight of number of out of stock products, low stock products, on route deliveries. Also gives a graphical representation about the stock.
Easy navbar for Quick access of other pages and quick add product/bill/vendor option.
Dashboard
Products
The pharmacist gets an option to add medicines to his inventory either by adding it manually like the conventional approach or scan the medicine’s barcode from the box.
Product page - Empty state - add product form
To add the products by scanning, pharmacists can scan the barcode of the medicine box with the help of the partner app that allows them to scan, then the user has to enter the low stock warning number and then it shows a success prompt once the product is added to the inventory.
The landing page here has all the products that are available in the inventory listed here, specific medicine can be easily searched using the search box or the sorting according to need.
Product page
Billing
The landing page here gives a quick insight on the sales and profits. It also shows the recent products sold.
Billing page
Create bill page - Show bill page
The bill is important to log every transaction, but here it also helps us manage the inventory.
Whenever a bill is added the number of products sold will be reduced from the database, hence managing the inventory without having to manually reduce the numbers.
Vendors
The pharmacists have a hard time contacting and remembering the vendors, they mostly use their phones for this but it would help them keep if all their vendors’ contact info is available at one place!
New vendors can be manually added.
Add vendor page - Vendor page
Deliveries
Pharmacists usually track their deliveries through their delivery partners website, but after establishing the integration they can track their orders from the website itself.
The pharmacists will have to give the necessary info that can help us get the delivery data from the respective delivery website and display it onto our website.
Delivery dash - Create integration page
Individual product delivery detail page - delivery tracking page
Notifications
The pharmacists get a reminder as a notification whenever a certain medicine is low in stock or out of stock or is arriving soon, so that the pharmacists can act accordingly and manage the inventory efficiently.
Notifications page
Profile
The user can edit their personal info and choose to use their own display picture here by removing the default photo.
The user can also log out from the platform from here.
Profile page
FAQs
The platform for a newcomer can be problematic, so we made a FAQ page where the platform’s functionalities can be explained.
FAQs Page
Prototype 🌈
All the UI screens are prototyped using interactive components and dissolve properties in figma.
