Collaboration with Data in the Context of the United Nations’ Supply Chain Operations

This Capstone project offered the opportunity to collaborate with senior leadership of the Office of Supply Chain Management (OSCM) for the United Nations Secretariat. The Capstone team focused on using data to supportsupply chain management, evaluating the current state of data utilization, mapping clients, and identifying opportunities for innovation in the use of data. After gaining access to the OSCM’s dashboards, the team identified opportunities to promote a more role-centric approach with tailored layouts, user-friendly features, and actionable analytics. The goal was to help the UN OSCM foster a more role-centric data culture that supports evidence-based decisions by the data consumers.

The project had three phases.

Phase 1: Understand users' roles and their needs:

  • Prioritize one existing dashboard to deep dive
  • Conduct a survey and in-depth interviews to learn about user experience with the currentdashboard and potential improvements

Phase 2: Create two prototype user-centric dashboards

  • Design a layout specific to one user group
  • Add user-centric analytics and customized visualization by user role
  • Add an illustrative and interactive user guide for part of the dashboards

Phase 3: Develop a Roadmap to scale-up dashboards formany roles

  • Break down into steps to develop customized dashboards that contemplate role needs

The aim of theproject was to contribute to the OSCM’s 5-year roadmap and, more broadly, the UN datastrategy. The final deliverable contained the prototype dashboards, data collected from the survey and in-depth interviews, and a final report of the customization process.