Companies invest millions in sophisticated logistics systems, inventory management software, and warehouse automation. Yet even the most advanced technology fails to deliver results when the employees using these systems struggle to navigate them effectively.
The truth is simple but often overlooked: your supply chain’s performance ultimately depends on human performance.
Supply chain issues are often software experience issues
Delayed orders. Unreliable inventory counts. Low customer satisfaction. While these all seem like supply chain issues, they’re actually signs your workforce is struggling with the software and processes in place.
Poor employee software experience often leads to:
- Unhappy, unproductive employees. 70% of training content is forgotten within 24 hours. When your workforce doesn’t understand how to complete tasks in your systems (often due to ineffective onboarding and training), they create workarounds that create delays, inconsistencies, and visibility gaps.
- Expensive errors. Without standardized, easy-to-follow workflows, employees handle the same tasks differently. This variation leads to quality issues, compliance risks, and unpredictable outcomes.
- Dissatisfied customers and damaged relationships. Lack of process, errors, and mis-set expectations can harm customer relationships and brand image. How many times has a customer traveled to your stores, only to find that the item they saw online isn’t actually in stock?
The answer to this isn’t adding more tech to an already complex tech stack. Rather, it’s analyzing your current software usage and then acting on it so it works for everyone.
Step 1: Understand what’s working (and what’s not)
Effective improvement begins with measurement. To optimize your supply chain operations, you need visibility into:
- Quantitative usage analytics reveal what employees do in your applications, where they spend time, which features they use (or don’t), and how behaviors differ across roles, locations, and experience levels. These insights expose inefficient workflows and adoption gaps that would otherwise remain hidden.
- Qualitative feedback, captured while your employee is interacting with the application, via email, or through support tickets, reveals how your employees feel and why they do what they do. Their input is invaluable for identifying frustration points—or necessary improvements—that behavioral analytics alone doesn’t reveal.
Step 2: Onboard and educate your employees
Traditional training methods—one-off sessions, printed manuals, and video tutorials—don’t cut it in today’s supply chain environment. Information is forgotten, manuals go unread, and employees revert to asking their peers when stuck.
Instead, companies are beginning to use in-the-moment, contextual training to offer support, directly within an employee’s workflow. Think: in-the-moment training and walkthroughs, onboarding checklists, email nudges, and embedded guides that include tips based on a user’s role or location. Instead of separate training sessions, employees receive contextual help exactly when and where they need it.
Make sure you’re offering:
- Personalized new user onboarding, by role, team, or location, to ensure employees focus on the specific tools and processes relevant to their responsibilities. For example, a buyer receives a different guided experience than a receiving associate in a distribution center.
- Just-in-time, in-app training for complex, new, or infrequent tasks by providing instructions at the moment of need. For quarterly inventory counts or end-of-month reconciliation processes, guides walk employees through procedures they may not remember from initial training.
- Process change communications to deliver updates directly within applications. When a new shipping validation step is added or a vendor code format changes, employees receive notifications and guidance within their workflow.
Contextualized employee communications help you intervene effectively, all based on the insights gathered from your analytics and feedback.
Step 3: Monitor, iterate, and improve
Your employees are your best source of insight when it comes to improving and rethinking processes. Involving them as stakeholders to find solutions and improve processes can increase process adoption, employee buy-in, and satisfaction. After you implement new workflows and user communications, make sure you:
- Close the feedback loop by sharing updates and improvements with impacted employees (or anyone who shared feedback with you).
- Keep a pulse on sentiment, which can be found in employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS), user feedback, and frustration indicators within your session replay tool.
The world’s biggest supply chain retailers trust this three-step playbook
Your enterprise is complex already. Bring some simplicity into your workflows with Pendo’s software experience management (SXM) platform: giving you the tools to analyze usage, and then act on it.
By using Pendo to combine software data with timely communications, you can:
- Identify drop-off points, underused workflows, and confusion within key supply chain modules.
- Deliver contextual training or alerts directly in-app to guide proper usage, like how to initiate returns or enter advanced shipment notice (ASN) data.
- Understand how users complete critical tasks, like booking freight or updating delivery statuses.
- Monitor usage of new capabilities like demand forecasting tools or AI-recommended inventory actions.
- Collect real-time qualitative insights from warehouse managers, logistics planners, and other employees.
With Pendo, companies like yours are turning their biggest potential vulnerability—the human element—into their greatest competitive advantage.
The future of supply chain excellence isn’t just about having the best systems, it’s about ensuring your employees can use those systems to their full potential. See how you can use Pendo to improve your supply chain.
