Vendor Scorecard: Designing Measurable Trust in Supply Chain Collaboration
A performance scorecard that helps retailers and suppliers align on KPIs, track efficiency, and drive better decision-making across global supply chains.
Overview
Global retail ecosystems rely on hundreds of vendors, each with different data standards, timelines, and reliability. This fragmentation often leads to misaligned expectations and blame loops.
The Vendor Scorecard was designed to bridge those silos — aligning teams on a unified view of performance and creating measurable trust between vendors and retailers.
Duration
3 Months
Team Role
Lead Product Designer
Target Audience
UX Strategy & Data Visualization
Design System Integration (Activate)
Stakeholder Alignment & Platform Consistency
Tools
Figma
Figjam
Excel
Jira
Problem Space
Supply chain and vendor teams were operating from inconsistent reports that didn’t speak a common language.
KPIs like OTIF and Fill Rate were defined differently across regions.
Vendors couldn’t see how their performance was evaluated.
Reports were reactive, manual, and lacked interactivity.
The result: meetings were dominated by reconciliation, not improvement.
Business Metrics
Use Case
Report Requirements
User Persona
Overview
Goals
Motivation
Pain Points
Inconsistent or missing supplier data across tools
Jesal Chitalia
Difficult to isolate which vendor, SKU, or DC caused a metric drop
Jesal Chitalia
Lack of visual clarity in existing scorecards
Jesal Chitalia
Reports are reactive — problems discovered too late
Jesal Chitalia
Manual Excel work during performance review prep
Jesal Chitalia
Research & Insights
Through interviews and workflow mapping, I discovered that vendor managers
like Lisa spend hours every week cleaning and reconciling data before performance reviews.
Their biggest challenge wasn’t missing data — it was missing trust in how that data was calculated.
I used these insights to define design principles around transparency, consistency, and drill-down visibility.
To inform the design of the Vendor Scorecard Report, I conducted research focused on understanding the pain points of supply chain managers and retail stakeholders.
Design Approach
The design process focused on simplifying a complex data ecosystem into a modular, drill-able experience.
Low-Fidelity Blueprints: mapped data hierarchies and navigation logic
to define vendor → SKU → PO drill-down flow.High-Fidelity Concepts: designed using the NIQ Discover system, ensuring
alignment with Activate’s core analytics patterns.Design Alignment: iterated collaboratively with stakeholders to maintain brand
and data-system consistency across reports.
Structuring the Data
Low-Fidelity Blueprint
Designed low-fidelity (LFW) blueprints to define data hierarchy logic and user drill-down flows
High-Fidelity Concepts
Designed Recommended concepts based on NIQ discover design system
Concept 1
Concept 2
Design Alignment
After reviewing the initial high-fidelity concepts, stakeholders decided to align the report with the existing Activate design system instead of NIQ’s broader Discover system.
This ensured consistency across the entire Activate ecosystem — maintaining shared navigation patterns, data card structures, and visual hierarchy standards familiar to existing users. My role was to translate the proposed improvements into this system without losing clarity or usability.
Design Artifacts
Metrics Comparison charts
The bar and line charts in the scorecard allow users to compare multiple time periods, such as month-over-month or year-over-year data. This feature helps stakeholders understand how vendor performance trends evolve over time, providing a more comprehensive view of improvement or decline in key metrics like OTIF, revenue loss, and fill rate.
Table Design
Data Components and Interactive Data Visualization
As part of the business requirements for the Vendor Compliance Scorecard, a key focus was placed on delivering intuitive data visualization components that allow users to easily compare and analyze vendor performance over specific time periods. One of the primary requirements was to visually represent comparison periods in a clear, engaging manner and provide users with interactive features such as labels for detailed insights.
Impact & Outcomes
60% reduction in manual reporting and Excel dependency
Unified performance definitions across four regional teams
Vendors actively adopted the dashboard in monthly reviews
Improved collaboration and transparency across the supply chain
Reflection
“Designing for trust in data is harder than designing for beauty.
The real win was making supply-chain data actionable and emotionally trustworthy for humans.”