Workshop insights into digitized coatings procurement

Role: Staff Design Consultant
Timeline: 3 months
Engagement: Advisory — UX workshop facilitation

Situation

A B2B coatings buyer trying to order industrial or marine product still depended on offline, manual procurement — no digital order management, documentation access, or selector. Hempel needed a digitisation roadmap, not a feature wishlist. Three months of advisory had to turn workshop friction into sequenced product work.

My mandate

I owned: Workshop facilitation, end-to-end friction mapping, ROI-ranked roadmap synthesis, and handoff into MyHempel priorities.
Others owned: Hempel stakeholders owned domain truth and commercial priorities. Internal product owned eventual build.
Final decisions: Hempel product leadership on what entered the roadmap.
Team: Staff design consultant facilitating stakeholder workshops.
Authority: Advisory — recommendations, not delivery ownership of MyHempel engineering.
Delivery constraints: Three-month window; offline-to-digital transition; industrial/marine compliance documentation.

Critical decision

Situation

Stakeholders surfaced many pains. The decision was how to score and sequence them so the roadmap was not a flat brainstorm list.

Options considered

Equal-weight feature backlog from every workshop sticky
Would produce a catalogue without commercial sequencing — easy to ignore.
Only digitise order placement
Ignored discovery, field use, fulfillment opacity, and compliance docs — the frictions that blocked trust in a portal.
Score friction by customer pain × ROI, then sequence four core areas

Observation

Workshop maps of the manual procurement journey showed repeated pain at technical discovery, mobile/field use, staggered fulfillment visibility, and disconnected compliance documentation.

Insight

Ranking drops some stakeholder favourites — necessary so MyHempel could start with order management, documentation, and a smart coating selector instead of boiling the ocean.

Response

Publish an ROI-ranked roadmap: rigid technical product discovery, field/mobile usability, opaque staggered fulfillment, and disconnected compliance documentation as the highest-leverage set.

Result

Recommendations informed MyHempel’s core feature set. Directional link from workshop to product — not a claim of sole authorship of the live portal.

How the system changed

01
Facilitated workshops mapping the manual procurement process end to end.
02
Built a friction map and scored areas by customer pain and ROI rather than volume of complaints alone.
03
Compared a before (offline, opaque) and after (sequenced digital priorities) roadmap view for stakeholders.
04
Handed off priorities that map to order management, instant documentation, and the smart coating system selector.

Outcome

organisational

Organisational: ranked roadmap

Friction sequenced against customer pain and ROI instead of a flat feature checklist.

business

Business: informed MyHempel

Workshop priorities map onto MyHempel’s core digitisation features today.

operational

Operational: high-leverage advisory

Three months produced foundational direction without pretending to ship the full platform in-session.

Frames

Workshop evidence: manual procurement mapped end to end so friction was visible as a system, not anecdotes.
Friction map: four highest-ROI areas — discovery, field use, fulfillment opacity, compliance docs.
Roadmap after scoring: order management, documentation, and coating selector sequenced for MyHempel — not an equal wishlist.

What I would change now

Include the scoring criteria table (pain × ROI) as a first-class artefact on the page so the prioritisation logic is inspectable, not just asserted.

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