Surface 01
Supplier Dashboard
A single glance at Open, Invited, Responded RFQs and unread messages — the four numbers Isabella opens the app to check.
Case Study · 2019–20Defence · Procurement SaaS32 weeks
ST Engineering Land Systems · Procurement
One defence supply chain — four portals, one truth.
ST Engineering Land Systems' procurement programme ran on four disconnected portals — Buyer, Supplier, Manager and System Admin — plus a long tail of email and Excel. We redesigned them into a single, audit-grade workspace where a tender is one object from publish to award.
4 → 1
Portals consolidated
−63%
RFQ turnaround
+118%
Supplier activation
01Project Overview
A thirty-two-week consolidation of four defence procurement portals into one.
KDM, ST Engineering Land Systems' procurement arm, had grown a different portal for each role and a different process for each portal. The brief was deceptively simple: one tender, one truth — across buyer, supplier, manager and auditor.
Design a procurement workspace that a buyer can defend, a supplier can trust, a manager can govern, and an auditor can read in chronological order.
My Role
Lead UX Designer
Research, IA, interaction, prototyping, design system, hand-off.
Duration
32 weeks
Sep 2019 – Apr 2020
Platform
Web · Responsive
4 role-based portals
Team
1 Lead UX · 1 Visual · 1 PM · 4 Full-stack Eng · 1 QA · 1 KDM SME
Methods
Stakeholder interviews · Tender shadowing · IA card-sort · Wireframes · Hi-fi prototypes · Moderated usability
Tools
Adobe XD · Sketch · InVision · Zeplin · Jira · Confluence
02Problem Statement
Same tender, four different shapes.
KDM published RFQs by email, suppliers replied with PDFs, buyers rebuilt comparison tables in Excel, and the auditor reconciled it all in a spreadsheet at month-end. Every role believed in a different version of the same tender.
01
Four logins, one workflow
Buyers, Suppliers, Managers and Admins each had their own portal — same tender data, four different shapes, four sign-ins.
02
RFQ by email and spreadsheet
Quotes returned as PDF attachments; price comparison was rebuilt in Excel for every tender. Audit trail lived in inboxes.
03
Suppliers couldn't self-serve
Onboarding required a long email chain with KDM. 58% of registrations stalled before the first RFQ — capability data never reached buyers.
03Research & Discovery
Four roles, one tender.
Over six weeks we shadowed three live tenders end-to-end, interviewed 14 suppliers across Singapore, Malaysia and India, sat with 6 KDM buyers and 2 auditors, and audited 4 incumbent procurement tools.
14
Suppliers
6
Buyers
3
Live tenders
01
The tender is the unit of work
Every role — buyer, supplier, manager, auditor — orbits a single RFQ. We organised the IA around the tender, not the role.
02
Trust is built at the price-comparison table
Buyers don't decide on the supplier page. They decide on the side-by-side. We made price comparison a first-class surface, not an export.
03
Suppliers fear silence more than rejection
13 of 14 suppliers interviewed had abandoned a portal because they couldn't tell if a quote was received. Status had to be glanceable.
04
Auditors need a story, not a log
System Admin needed who-did-what-when as a readable timeline per supplier, filtered by date — not a dump of rows in a CSV.
Primary personas
Johnny, 38
Buyer · KDM Procurement
“I just need the five quotes in one table so I can defend my pick.”
- · Side-by-side pricing
- · Invite-only RFQs
- · One audit-ready trail
Isabella, 42
Supplier · Abc Industries
“Tell me you got it. I don't need a portal — I need a receipt.”
- · Glanceable RFQ status
- · Save-draft quotes
- · Capability uploads
Jacob, 45
Manager · Supplier Admin
“Approving a supplier shouldn't take three screens and a spreadsheet.”
- · Tier upgrades inline
- · Bulk supplier view
- · Secondary contacts
Russell, 50
System Admin · Audit & Compliance
“If it isn't traceable to a person and a timestamp, it didn't happen.”
- · Per-supplier audit log
- · Date-range filtering
- · Read-only trail
Competitive landscape
Player
Strength
Weakness
Our opportunity
SAP Ariba
Enterprise breadth
Heavy, generic UI
Defence-specific clarity
Coupa
Polished buyer UX
Weak supplier side
Equal weight to both roles
Internal email + Excel
Familiar
No audit, no trust
One source of truth
GeBIZ (gov procurement)
Compliance pedigree
1990s interaction model
Modern, lightweight
04Design Process
Map the tender, not the org chart.
We worked backwards from a single shared timeline — Publish, Invite, Respond, Compare, Award, Audit — and forced every screen, in every portal, to belong to one stage. Roles got their own front door; the back room was one shared system.
01
Map the tender lifecycle, not the org chart
We drew one timeline — Publish → Invite → Respond → Compare → Award → Audit — and snapped every screen, in every portal, onto a single stage.
02
Four front doors, one back room
Kept four role-specific entry portals (security, branding, mental model) but unified the data model, components, and patterns underneath.
03
Status as a first-class object
Open · Invited · Responded · Awarded · Closed became a single coloured chip used identically on every screen, every role, every email.
04
Price comparison as the hero
Promoted the buyer's comparison table from a hidden export to a tab. One row per supplier, one column per line item, totals and L1/L2 access tier inline.
05
Audit as a readable timeline
Re-cut System Admin from a flat table into a per-supplier story — grouped by date, named actor, plain-English action — exportable but readable first.
One tender lifecycle, every role
- Stage 01Publish
- Stage 02Invite
- Stage 03Respond
- Stage 04Compare
- Stage 05Award
- Stage 06Audit
The Compare stage — the buyer's price-comparison table — became the design centre of gravity. Everything before it earns the comparison; everything after it executes the decision.
05Solution
One workspace. Four front doors.
The final system ships as four role-scoped portals on a single design system — a shared component library (40+ tokens, 22 components), one status vocabulary, one tender object, one audit trail.
Surface 02
RFQ Workspace
One tender, three tabs: Details, Responses, Price Comparison. The same shell for buyers and suppliers — only the verbs change.
Surface 03
Buyer Tender Detail
Every contractual field — payment terms, Incoterms, validity, contacts, BOM — laid out in a defensible, printable, audit-ready sheet.
Surface 04
Price Comparison
Ten supplier responses side-by-side, line by line, with totals and L1/L2 access tier. The award decision happens on this single screen.
Surface 05
Supplier Management (Manager)
A searchable register of every supplier, with inline tier upgrades and a secondary-contact tab — replacing a four-step admin form.
Surface 06
Supplier Profile (Manager)
One sheet, five tabs — Details, Secondary Contacts, Products, Services, Misc — the whole supplier relationship on a single URL.
Surface 07
Audit Timeline (System Admin)
Per-supplier, per-day, per-actor: Login, Created Service, Deleted Product, Responded Tender — a readable story instead of a CSV.
Design system — STE Procurement
Colour
6 brand tokens
Red · charcoal · steel · 3 surfaces
Type
Display + Mono
Sora display · Inter UI · JetBrains for refs
Status chips
5 states
Open · Invited · Responded · Awarded · Closed
Components
22 shipped
Tables, forms, drawers, audit timeline
#E1251B
#4A4A4A
#6E6E6E
#8A8A8A
#ECECEC
#DCDCDC
06Impact & Results
From four portals to one supply chain.
Six months after rollout, KDM had retired three internal trackers, suppliers were quoting in-app instead of by email, and the auditor's monthly reconciliation moved from three days to a filter.
4 → 1
Portals consolidated
Buyer · Supplier · Manager · System Admin
−63%
RFQ turnaround
Publish → award, vs. email baseline
+118%
Supplier activation
Registration → first quote
100%
Audit coverage
Every action attributable to a user
“We used to argue about whose spreadsheet was right. Now we just open the tender. The portal is the answer.”
Procurement Lead · KDM, ST Engineering Land Systems
Lesson 01
Defence UX is not military UX.
Our users are procurement officers and suppliers — not soldiers. We dropped the camo metaphor on day one and designed for a calm, compliance-grade workplace.
Lesson 02
Status is a product.
Five words — Open, Invited, Responded, Awarded, Closed — did more for trust than any redesign of the tender form.
Lesson 03
Audit-first earns the buyer's trust.
Once Russell could pull a clean timeline per supplier, KDM stopped insisting on parallel paper logs. The portal became the system of record.
What I'd do differently
Ship the audit timeline first, not last. Once Russell trusted the trail, every other change met less internal resistance. The audit log wasn't a compliance feature — it was the trust feature that made the rest of the redesign possible.
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