More than just a pretty interface: How a human-centric solution rewards investment with long-term, scalable growth

Jan 7, 2025 • 9 min

As companies scour the market for ways to improve planning efficiency and secure long-term ROI, many business leaders naturally look to AI and data refinement to drive growth. Amid their deliberations, however, many are missing a vital consideration: How will the user experience impact implementation and the longevity of the solution?

The often-overlooked, unsung hero of sustained ROI is human-centric solution design.

Human-centric design principles make tech innovations more effective by coupling them with an intuitive user experience that drives bottom-up success, helping teams optimize daily decisions and make rapid-fire adjustments so the business as a whole can improve, scale, and repeat.

The elements of solution design

Solution design is a complex domain where focus and scope can vary from overall strategy to fine details. At RELEX, we break it into three elements, all of which involve direct customer or prospect input.

Strategic design guides future solution developments. It aligns design plans and processes with organizational goals to address complex challenges and create long-term value.
Experience design is the tactical side of design focused on how a user will interact with the system. It involves in-depth research to drive feature developments and improvements.
Visual design ensures high visual quality and a cohesive look and feel throughout the platform. It focuses on enhancing component designs, interactions, and data visualizations.

Now that we have established the elements of design, let’s look at the principles that guide them.

The RELEX principles of human-centric design

The RELEX tenets of human-centric design answer a simple question: How will the system make the user’s decisions more efficient and effective?

By focusing on ground-level user empowerment, the solution enhances each planner’s decisions, building a firm foundation of consistent optimizations to improve overall business performance.

Let’s look at these principles in action.

1. A unified experience: Making data accessible and usable

While every RELEX principle we’ll discuss supports at least one element of solution design, a unified platform is the culmination of all of them. Strategic design helps RELEX build a roadmap that reflects and prioritizes the enhancements and innovations most important to the customer. Experience design ensures each team can understand and communicate decisions effectively, supported by a collective visual design experience across departments. The result is a unified planning solution that helps teams harness each other’s data insights – and it’s the key to market differentiation.

Among the litany of supply chain and retail planning woes, one of the most lamented is the organizational silo. Data streams trickle out before they reach a shared data pool, and teams lack visibility across functions. This leads to disjointed planning, inefficiencies, and KPIs that remain aspirational but not feasible.

A human-centric solution provides a unified experience both functionally and visually. While the underlying platform ensures data flows smoothly between departments, visually cohesive and intuitive user interfaces present data in ways best suited to each planning function. The solution acts as an interpreter so teams can share data and enjoy an end-to-end planning suite while still tailoring dashboards, reports, and data formats to team-specific use cases. This unified approach breaks down silos and increases collaboration without forcing teams to use unfamiliar or unhelpful processes.

One RELEX customer, for instance, was concerned that their supply chain and promotions teams kept working at cross purposes, so the company asked RELEX to make it easier for these teams to talk to each other.

RELEX created a direct link between the modules these teams use.

From the Promotions module, the promo planners can send their upcoming plans and the expected sales uplift to the supply chain team. Within their own Forecasting & Replenishment module, the supply chain team can determine if inventory can support the promotion and request a cancellation or adjustment if not. This request is sent back to the Promotions module so the promo team can modify plans accordingly.

This unified approach helps teams communicate and make better, more collaborative decisions quickly and easily.

The big picture benefits: A unified platform improves planning and data sharing at a granular level across the company, ensuring teams can meet end-customer expectations as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

2. An adaptable platform: Giving users better control

No two businesses are exactly alike, but traditional planning systems often limit companies to rigid, predetermined, or generic templates and processes.

Adaptable solutions allow companies and their partners to experiment and develop processes that support their unique strategies. With configurable dashboards, customizable tables, and flexibility in setting KPIs, users can respond quickly to new data and changes in the operating environment and shape plans to the company’s specific goals.

Let’s consider coding and customization as an example. Say you want to fine-tune your forecasting and replenishment process. Most tech providers can only customize their solutions through costly and time-consuming projects that involve changing the software’s code.

***Fig. 1:*** *A RELEX user could build a workflow using different filters and actions to set product-locations and optimize adaptive order parameters – all within the UI’s configuration window.*

At RELEX, we’ve developed a “configure, don’t code” approach that eliminates the laborious coding process. Thanks to a unique customization layer built into the software, users can alter their processes through a business rules engine. Essentially, it’s plug-and-play configurability. In the UI’s configuration window, users can drag and drop components or copy/paste existing workflows to edit or establish business rules.

According to Simon Svensson, Logistics Developer at Oda, “The ability to configure RELEX ourselves has been essential, enabling us to customize the system to our specific requirements without needing extensive coding knowledge.” The business rules engine helped the company automate processes, reduce food waste, and increase operational efficiency.

The big picture benefits: The ease of configurability enables in-house control of the solution, unprecedented turnaround time on customization projects, and faster, more competitive responses to market shifts. It also cuts down on the amount of IT intervention required for solution maintenance, so that IT leaders can dedicate time and resources to other priorities.

3. No “black box”: Improving user trust through transparency

In the age of AI and automation, planning systems should focus human attention where it will make the biggest impact. For example, the RELEX forecasting module alerts planners to forecast exceptions instead of giving them 500 rows to check. By focusing on anomalies, planners can act quickly and make informed decisions that won’t keep them up later that night.

Those alerts, however, don’t exist in a black box. With the click of a button, users can delve into the data determining those exceptions, gaining the insights they need to make the right calls in complex, chaotic planning environments.

The big picture benefits: By providing planners with both recommended actions and access to the behind-the-scenes calculations, the solution increases user trust. This transparency makes it less likely a user will overrule an accurate data-driven recommendation. This trust has a domino effect on all following decisions, improving accuracy at each stage of planning and execution for efficiency-driven profitability and customer satisfaction.

4. User expertise: Enabling faster onboarding and continuous learning

Efficient supply chains rely on users having quick access to data and solution support. How can tech providers put information at users’ fingertips?

For one thing, navigating the solution shouldn’t compound decision-making challenges. A user interface should do what users expect it to do, streamlining implementation, daily tasks, and new employee onboarding. Easy-to-adopt solutions break the cycle of endless go-lives and ensure minimal future disruption as roles change and new users join the team.

On top of that, data-sharing and AI capabilities should seamlessly integrate into workflows, especially now that supply chain AI agents are bridging the gap between knowledge bases and user tasks.

Take Rebot, the RELEX AI assistant, as an example. Users go to Rebot every day for fast, straightforward answers to industry- or solution-specific questions. Rebot’s conversational approach makes it easy for users to onboard quickly and continue becoming solution experts over time. The speed and ease of ongoing AI support helps planners address issues quickly and seize sudden market opportunities.

RELEX is working to expand Rebot’s analytics capabilities so it can synthesize and shuttle data insights across the company and suggest plan adjustments based on real-world conditions and real-time planning decisions.

***Fig. 2:*** *RELEX is exploring new ways Rebot could learn to analyze data and answer customer-specific questions regarding demand shifts, anomalies, and recommendations, as depicted in this hypothetical example.*

The big picture benefits: Human centricity guides the entirety and effectiveness of a company’s tech journey. At the beginning, an intuitive system leads to easier adoption and low-friction change management, speeding time-to-value. Once a company gets past implementation and into the rhythm of daily planning, the platform’s adaptability and built-in user empowerment increase its scalability – and therefore the longevity of the investment.

5. Human-friendly interfaces for long-term solution adoption and improvement

There’s a reason the phrase “look and feel” exists. Human beings are influenced not just by the function of objects around them but by the emotional response those objects elicit. Aesthetics and tone are especially important in solution design since users can be staring at this screen for eight hours a day.

Visually, the solution should be clear but friendly. A modern interface minimizes distractions so users can focus on data and their to-do lists. Plus, each module should reflect the same overall design to keep things cohesive across teams.

The tone of communication during system interactions is also important. For instance, in the tech world, some error messages have grown infamous for the visceral reactions they elicit. At the same time, trying to mitigate bad news with false cheerfulness doesn’t help.

Solution design should address the worst part of these alerts: the accompanying (and often increasing) feeling of helplessness and instead, empower users to make the right next step. Alerts should offer fixes, helpful links, or contact information for support. In time, AI agents like Rebot are poised to assist planners in detecting, solving, and preventing these kinds of errors.

The big picture benefits: At the end of the day, the easier and more comfortable the solution is to use, the more likely users are to make the most of its data and AI capabilities, quickly adopting and applying innovations as they are integrated into the platform.

6. Partnership: Designing a user-friendly platform around real-world needs

Let’s talk about the actual humans involved in human-centric solution design.

From decision-makers and buyers to planners and users, your teams should have an open channel of communication with your tech provider’s R&D team. This partnership is at the core of successful tech investments. A solution can only be user-friendly and support company-specific strategies if the developer understands user needs and overall KPIs.

RELEX is dedicated to every element of design. From brainstorming to development, our team directly involves customers and prospects in co-creating solutions. We conduct user research to generate quantitative and qualitative insights and drive ease of use, efficiency, and new feature development.

This collaboration, backed by RELEX technology, helps businesses like Selco Builders Warehouse increase efficiency, optimize inventory management, and improve availability.

David Rose, Selco’s Head of Supply Chain, highlights the role of this partnership: “Without a doubt, one of the best experiences we had with RELEX was the way they collaborated with us…We felt that RELEX were our friends, and we had a relationship where we could be open and honest and discuss options freely.”

The decisions born of those discussions resulted in business benefits like a 3.8% improvement in standard product availability and a 6.7% increase in availability over project quantity.

By spending time with customers, RELEX learns about their daily processes and the challenges they face or foresee. Together, we develop user-friendly solutions to meet those current and future needs.

The big picture benefits: Tech providers might have expertise, but they are not making your company’s daily decisions. They can only design solutions around real-world needs if they have customer input guiding design developments. The benefits of all the preceding principles are only enhanced and sustained by close, ongoing partnerships between companies and their tech providers.

Business growth is greater than the sum of its parts

Your planning solution should be a business growth engine with your users as your drivers.

By adopting a scalable solution designed around the humans using it, business leaders give their teams the tools, data analytics, and upskill opportunities they need to adapt to changing planning environments, meet customer demand, and achieve KPIs.

Perfecting daily decision-making exponentially increases the benefit of each decision, creating company-wide ripple effects that help businesses realize and expand their strategic visions and fuel overall growth, now and far into the future.

See how the RELEX platform empowers users while delivering innovations at scale