Victor Hugo | Araujo Drugstore

Araujo Drugstore is a major drugstore chain in Minas Gerais, Brazil, with over 250 stores, making it the largest in its sector in the state. In addition to medications, Araujo offers customers a range of non-pharmaceutical convenience products, following the drugstore model. As a retail business, it must prepare its inventory and distribution to stores according to seasonal and promotional needs.

Each store has a predefined quantity of products based on their specific scenario. However, during promotions, changes in central inventory, partnerships with brands, or seasonal demand, analysts from the Product Demand Management team must conduct studies to determine a customized quantity of specific items, a process they call ad-hoc product purchase. This requires individualized attention for each store, and team members split tasks to manage the high volume of stores and products.

immersion

The discovery process began with shadowing sessions to observe the analysts' work, understand their workflow, and identify tools and challenges. Key issues identified include:

Spreadsheets with thousands of rows that crash computers.
Highly manual processes.
epetitive Excel operations consuming nearly the entire workday.
Outdated platform for spreadsheet upload.

design sprint

DAY 1

UNDERSTAND

Storytelling
Personas

DAY 2

PLAN

Problem Framing
How Might We

DAY 3

DECIDE

Product Goals
User Journey

DAY 4

PROTOTYPE

Co-creation session
Screen prototyping
Validation

main problems discovered

Spreadsheets with thousands of rows that crash computers
Non-parameterizable demand calculation rules, leading to rework due to incomplete data
Overlapping of settings from different users (e.g., when two or more users were defining actions for the same product the system only recognized one)
Poor integration between departments
spreadsheets being exchanged via email, which makes it difficult to have up-to-date information

problem framing

Using problem-framing techniques, we defined the following challenge:

Adjust the ad-hoc product purchase process and create a customizable and integrated tool to control in-store inventory.

how might we

The "How Might We" framework guided solution hypotheses for ideation.

How might we gather accurate, useful information?

How might we build an efficient ad-hoc product purchase platform?

How might we improve integration and communication across departments?

building the minimum viable product

As one of the people responsible for the product strategy, I connected the development team with Araujo team, helping to prioritize features based on effort and delivery value. At the end of this process we had definied the main parts of the product that would serve as a goal to the team.