The Project

A single source of truth

AB InBev has 314 operations in its Supply Chain area, with 189 plants spread across 48 countries. The Supply Chain Portal offers a self-assessment system, which plays a significant role in the evaluation and, consequently, in the management of teams and individuals.

Because the current system was implemented organically, with contributions from different areas at different times, the experience needs to be redesigned. The goal is to make it more user-friendly, consistent, and effective. The result is the creation of a single source of truth for key operational metrics.

The Challenge

From offline to online in less than a year.

AB InBev's Supply Chain department had a global goal for 2025: to increase operational excellence across all its business units. To achieve this, it planned two major changes.

First, it began designing a clear and progressive path for all business units to follow, regardless of location or activity.

Second, it created a new management logic, which would be rolled out across all five existing excellence programs.

The other challenge was to recreate the operational self-assessment questionnaire, located on the Supply Chain Portal, considering the newly created rules. The new questionnaire had to be simple, efficient, and educational, allowing users to understand what was being asked, why, how to fill in the fields, and the required next steps.

The Process

Simplifying complexity

Our mission was to make the monthly self-assessment process smarter for the business and clearer for the users, without omitting any details. To achieve this, we followed four interconnected design guidelines:

1. Design clear and objective interfaces.

2. Organize the information architecture to avoid errors when completing the self-assessment form.

3. Maintain design consistency, modifying the company's current design system if necessary.

4. Design modular and scalable components, as the self-assessment system would be the starting point for rethinking the Supply Chain Portal experience as a whole.

The Solution

A personalized hub with actionable content and a potential new business.

Our product vision was based on the needs of users completing the monthly self-assessment questionnaire. To simplify the process, our design drank (pun intended) from the principles of progressive disclosure and minimalism in interfaces. Upon accessing the self-assessment questionnaire, users were presented with an overview of their plant, with information consolidated in a dashboard format. As users clicked on elements, such as boxes, graphs, and tables, they could dive deeper into the displayed numbers.

After defining the product vision, we moved directly to the production phase, as AB InBev already had a software factory ready. The biggest challenge was understanding all the new business rules (many of which were still being refined) and designing, without wireframes, the final layouts for three different users, with distinct roles and needs. The first screen flow, for the self-assessment itself, was directed to the unit manager, who was required to complete the questionnaire efficiently and accurately. The second screen flow, for the self-assessment audit, was directed to senior managers, who reviewed the numbers submitted by the business units. The third and final screen flow was aimed at the system's global administrators, responsible for managing the units and elements displayed on the screens.

Results

In less than six months, we designed the three workflows mentioned in the solution and created the necessary cuts to ensure the MVP went live in January 2025.

During the process, the layouts of the new self-assessment questionnaire circulated worldwide, receiving positive feedback and suggestions for new features.

The streamlined design excited the project's global sponsors, who began to consider it a standard to be followed by the other systems in the Supply Chain Portal.