Aufgabe

XL Axiata wanted to understand their distribution network — to get data, to get insights, to understand precisely what’s going on with their SIM card sales, and how to adjust their offers to better suit the needs of the customer in the real-world.

Among other things, XL Axiata sells SIM cards throughout Indonesia, a wonderful country in Southeast Asia with a population of 264 million people living. What’s particularly interesting is the number of islands: between 16,056 and 17,508, depending on your sources. Apparently, counting islands is not as straightforward as one would think. You can quickly see that the combination of all geographical features — country size, terrain, etc. — instantly turns the logistics of delivering of your products into a logistical nightmare.

XL Axiata operates only about 300 of its own retail stores, and relies on the network of third-party wholesalers, distributors and retailers to sell their SIM cards. The more entities involved, the more convoluted the process becomes; or, to put it simply, it’s challenging! There is next to no visibility, you don’t know who you’re actually selling to, how these SIM cards end up being used and what the most popular plans are.

Lösung

We started with a Discovery Sprint that lasted three weeks and involved plenty of work, doing workshops with the client, developing roles and personas, and supporting long field trips around some exotic places in remote areas of Indonesia.

We were visiting major dealers in Jakarta and outskirts, Makassar, and Yogyakarta, interviewing the owners and/or employees of all these tiny shops — who were some of the nicest and most helpful people. Some of the places we visited are far from the cityscapes we envisage to find XL Axiata Retail Stores. Many of the outlets are tiny villages; some are just a few houses next to a road in the middle of nowhere. And these are not standalone stores, as you might imagine reading this in London or Paris or New York. Rather, it’s a family home, where most families earn their livelihood selling fresh homemade food in one corner and SIM cards in another.

This kind of field research massively helps to cut the gap, the disconnect, that is always there, between the suits in corporate headquarters in air-conditioned skyscrapers — and the reality of the business; how products exist in the context of real life; in the context of the lives of real people.

The people selling the SIM cards told us some interesting ideas how to automate the process — how to get around the weird complex logistics of registering a SIM card that we witnessed and make it more convenient for their customers. We brought back everything we gathered to the client's HQ in Jakarta.

Ergebnis

There were some remarkable findings: for example, conflicting KPIs and broken loyalty programs.

After synthesizing the research results, we came up with 15 suggestions on various initiatives for getting and revealing the hidden data.

The idea that we thought the best was to focus on real-time provisioning. To assess the feasibility of this solution, we talked with some company stakeholders from logistics, marketing, law, compliance, data analytics, etc. Based on these findings, we created a risk impact analysis and a SWOT that revealed the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities for XL Axiata.

The obvious downside of real-time provisioning was that it would require at least one year of implementation. So the client decided to opt for an easier short-term solution, which was: to build a mobile app for the retailers and wholesalers.

We built a mobile app for retailers and wholesalers to simplify ordering and provisioning SIM cards from XL Axiata. The plan was to make it easier for them to order the cards, and if this was to work, then our client would get the precious data they were after.

Once again we saw that digital transformation is all about people. It’s vital to make people aware why change is needed, and carefully guide them from the old world to the new digital one. Your job as a designer is to teach them new skills and to dissolve their fears that they would become irrelevant in the new digital world.