Brief
Through direct collaboration, I led deep mapping of more than 30 events to visualize how fulfillment breakdowns cascaded across systems. What began as uncovering why promised availability diverged from actual delivery evolved into a full diagnostic initiative.
These visualizations transformed scattered symptoms into clear failure modes, enabling leadership and the data team to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive investigation and remediation, identifying $15m in biannual recoverable losses.
My Role
Senior designer / 4 months
Design thinking
I partnered with supply chain, data science, and regional operations to map how fulfillment events moved across systems. By visualizing how data, tools, and decisions interacted across the network, I synthesized patterns of failure, identified decision friction, and visualized impact pathways to help executives and engineers prioritize the most critical opportunities. My focus was ensuring the story of why things broke was as clear as how to fix them.
• Led discovery and visualization of end-to-end fulfillment event flows.
- • Facilitated deep dives with supply chain, regional management, FC/DC teams, data science, and operations.
- • Translated technical / system findings into business-ready narratives and recommendations.
- • Defined failure modes and prioritized opportunities by business impact.
The Conflict
Systems failed, orders stalled, and brand reputation took the hit.
Fulfillment operations were breaking down under pressure. Distribution centers were overwhelmed, systems failed to keep pace, and excess stock piled up while backorders went unresolved. Orders stalled or disappeared, creating costly inefficiencies and customer experiences that eroded trust and damaged the brand.
Making Order Breakdowns Visible
We mapped the end-to-end journey of an order, tracing every branch where data fragmentation or rule conflicts caused breakdowns. The result revealed a tangled ecosystem of misaligned systems and exceptions with no clear ownership. By visualizing these flows, we exposed hidden fallout and gave every stakeholder a shared lens into system breakdowns.
Through this process, we were able to clearly define the biggest contributors and their compounding factors. At a glance, each could be mapped back to our KPIs, giving leadership a direct line of sight between operational breakdowns and business impact.
Mapping conflicts and breakdowns across the ecosystem
Unpacking Failure events
I expanded the issues into a mapped network of 30+ events (see visual) and visualized cause-and-effect chains to show where breakdowns occurred across systems.
Cause and effect chain revealing critical issues, triggers that create more problems and manual overhead.
This process highlighted when failures created additional manual processes, when actions triggered further problems, when causes remained unknown, and when total system failure occurred.
Manual processes
Existing or reactionary manual activity
Issues creating more issues
- Snowballing or rippling issues
Deeper unknowns
- Newly discovered and existing issues we still don’t have answers for
Critical show stoppers
Delays, slow downs, or worse, inoperability
From Reactionary to Proactive
- Operation without visibility forces the whole business into constant firefighting mode, but with clear diagnostics and a proactive model a business could mitigate driving up labor and cost to serve. The comparison below exemplifies the values of a proactive framework against being reactionary.
Cost of Being Reactionary
Operating without visibility = constant firefighting
- • Customers had poor first-time experiences, damaging trust and shopping behavior.
- • Failures rippled through channels, driving up labor and cost to serve.
- • In the worst cases, loss of customers entirely.
Value of Being Proactive
With clear diagnostics and a proactive model
- • Match forecasted volume with CEC
- • Meeting customer expectations, encourage repeat behavior, & strengthening NPS.
- • Deliver consistent, reliable fulfillment
- • Meet costs the first time, staying within budget
- • Avoid the need to stand up additional resources.
- • Improve internal culture and eNPS by removing constant fire drills.
A Vision for the Future
- To anchor this shift, I designed an investigatory node map highlighting live events and flags downstream impacts so issues could be intercepted before they cascaded. Each node surfaced insights and suggested levers that could be pulled, giving users control at each stage to resolve breakdowns.
- I also proposed opportunities to extend this approach through modeling and AI simulation, such as forecasting performance during peak periods to help teams prepare in advance. Over time, automation could take on triage responsibilities, freeing teams to focus on higher-value work while ensuring a more resilient and proactive fulfillment model.
How might we simulate performance at normal vs peak so that team members can prevent undesirable situations?
The Impact
The Fulfillment Fallout discovery and mapping effort provided the business with visibility it had never had before. By tracing events end-to-end and surfacing cause-and-effect chains, we moved the organization from reacting to symptoms toward addressing systemic failure modes.
- Defined the problem space with clarity: Out of 22 mapped processes, 11 were identified as problematic, with 5 driving major business impact. Nearly half of these failures were manual, highlighting clear opportunities for automation.
- Linked failures to business impact: Each breakdown was mapped back to KPIs, quantifying where money was being lost and where customer trust was eroding.
- Enabled leadership action: Visual maps provided executives a shared view of the biggest contributors and their compounding factors, enabling data teams to focus on high-value areas instead of chasing scattered symptoms.
- Reduced downstream pain: By identifying hidden handoffs and exceptions, we laid the groundwork for fewer business-initiated refunds, reduced forced backorders, and fewer “where is my order” service contacts.
- Shifted the mindset: The work reframed fulfillment management from firefighting toward proactive investigation and resolution, creating the foundation for real-time monitoring, triage levers, and automation in the future.
Identified $15.1M in estimated biannual losses.
Financial impact revealed
Reflection
This project reinforced that being customer-centric does not always mean investing in storefront redesigns or adding new features. By listening carefully to the pain points such as missed orders, refunds, and customer frustration, we uncovered opportunities that saved the business millions and rebuilt trust.
It also reminded me the value of design as triage. By diagnosing breakdowns and connecting them back to customer and business impact, I learned how design can guide organizations out of firefighting mode and toward resilience.
I carry this lesson forward in every project; building clarity before beauty, and using customer pain as the lens for systemic design.
Need help with similar challenges?
Let’s talk if you’re hiring for a senior/staff designer, or just want to jam on solving complex UX problems.
Contact
Mathius Walsh
+1 650 761 [2230]
mathius@digicopia[dot]me
Location
- Currently residing in
- Seattle, WA USA
- Open to Hybrid and Remote
Social
Contact
email@domain.com
000-000-000