Contextual's xCap v2 was a demand planning suite that allowed various business managers to forcast need and commit to shipment of specific products.
Increasingly, manufacturers, distributors and resellers are faced with a problem that is commonly referred to as Supply Chain "Bullwhip Effect" (wild delivery swings ranging from inventory shortages to excess inventory). This "Bullwhip Effect" phenomenon results in lost revenue due to stock-outs, lost market share and preferred supplier status, and runaway inventory costs.
These problems stem from little or no visibility into accurate, timely, forward-looking demand information, and minimal demand planning workflow management capabilities. Existing Supply Chain and Demand Planning systems compound the demand forecasting and planning problem by focusing on historically based predictive algorithms instead of real-time customer demand information.
xCap v2 attempted to alleviate these problems.
xCap was created through an iterative, user-centered design process that included the end users - actual sales representatives from Palm - in the scoping, planning and production phases of the software development.
One of the most difficult aspects of this project was in the language of demand planning; the planning and commit managers used and expected vocabulary that was highly specific. Additionally, there were a number of complicated dependencies dictating which fields should be editable and by whom; for example, lag time was dictated by the channel and not by any individual, where target inventory was to be editable by all planners. Contextual research indicated that the planners and commit managers were well versed in Microsoft Excel; rather than force them to conform to our system, xCap allowed the various users to import and export from Microsoft Excel.
The software, a collaborative adaptive planning solution, was rolled out to Palm, a major electronic manufacturer, during the end of 2001. The results were quite good, and we were gearing up for our next rollout, when Contextual was driven out of business venture-capital related politics.
I was the only designer working on this project, and was responsible for the aesthetic quality of the software, the flow and interaction, the information architecture, and the usability engineering.
After the company folded, I cataloged the several iterations that were completed, and arranged them in a self-paced clickthrough. The clickthrough itself was an exercise in css & javascript portability, and it utilizes some relatively new methods at the time. As such, it was tested in Netscape 6.01 and Internet Explorer 6.0; anything else is a crap shoot. It seems to behave fairly well in Firefox.
