The Problem
The finance team at Cazoo is overstretched, dealing with many manual processes and individuals owning them, leading to a single point of failure. One of these processes is to calculate cost of sales which is about calculating the margin cost of a sold vehicle, which is done on a weekly basis.
The Challenge
Business objective:
Scale accounting system processes to support 100k unit sales in 2022.
Key result:
Reduce processing time for Cost of Sales / Unit Margin reporting by 30% by improving workflow efficiency.
My Role
Working in an agile squad with engineers and product I was responsible for leading problem discovery, ideation and solution delivery. This included discussing needs with stakeholders and users/ aligning to goals all the way to designing full solutions for build.
Please note: this piece of work is confidential and contains sensitive information. I have only covered a few areas in this case study. Please get in touch if you want to see more.
What is cost of sale?
The entirety of costs that go into selling a car, right from purchase for Cazoo to refurb and beyond.
Cazoo needs to know the margin it makes on each vehicle which is the sale price minus the cost of sale.
Why does this process exist?
To calculate the margin cost of a sold vehicle and report on it weekly and monthly
To accurately identify which cars have been sold and which should remain in our inventory.
How is it done?
A variety of different data sources are amalgomated into a massive spreadsheet.
It takes 11 hours in total.
Done weekly and monthly by 1 person so 1 source of failure.
The Approach
The users
Problem discovery
Solution discovery
As a team we ideated on different ideas to solve this problem. I ran a two hour workshop which included journey mapping, sketching and ideating in groups
Design, test, iterate
We sliced the work up to deliver value as soon as possible. I prototyped and tested with users every week. This included what was being built and what was coming up. We got into a good rhythm. Engineers were also very engaged in the research and asked plenty of questions.
Design output
New desktop application to replace the COS process. We used a MUI design system which is the standard for internal tools at Cazoo.
Please get in touch if you want to see more.
Outcomes
We managed to reduce the time it took to report the cost of sales process from 11 hours to just 1.5 hours. We went beyond our key result metric of 30% reduction but did not manage to fulfil our original goal of pushing to Netsuite and not quite catering for multiple roles.
It took six months to build and launch the tool due to the data issues and it was adopted quite quickly by multiple inventory accountants.
Impact
We went on to automate further processes and now have separate applications that accurately condense manual processes and help report accurate financial information. We went on to automate 2 other processes which led to a suite of reporting tools.