SPM — Case Study · Amaury Brito

SPM — retiring the legacy, by design.

Kohl’s ran ~$1.5 billion in annual store payroll budgets — its single largest SG&A line — through Excel and a tool Rube-Goldberg’d together over ~15 years on two legacy platforms that cost roughly $4.8 million a year to keep alive. I designed the greenfield platform that replaced them — intuitive, accessible, and built to scale — piloted in the field and launched in October 2024.

ROLE

Product Designer II

TEAM

Workforce Optimization · Eng · SOE Finance & Analytics

USERS

Store & district managers · corporate teams

LAUNCH

Piloted in 2 districts · live Oct 2024

A billion-dollar budget, managed in Excel.

For roughly 15 years, store payroll budgets flowed through a legacy tool Rube-Goldberg’d together on two platforms — Teradata (EDW) and MicroStrategy — and stitched with spreadsheets. It was expensive to keep alive, hard to navigate, and could not adapt to modern economic and operational demands.

The people using them — store and district managers — struggled to extract meaningful insight from the data at all.

$4.8Ma year to run the two legacy platforms, Teradata (EDW) and MicroStrategy

~$1.5Bin payroll budgets — Kohl’s single largest SG&A line company-wide

~15 yrsof legacy tooling and process to unwind without disrupting a payroll cycle

Listening to the people who close the books.

User interviews with store & district managers

Understood their real needs and daily challenges — where the current tools slowed them down and what “useful” actually looked like at store level.

Payroll process mapping

Mapped the payroll workflow end to end with finance, analytics, and engineering to find inefficiencies and opportunities for optimization.

KEY FINDINGS

Users wanted clearer data visualization and better navigation — not more features.

The legacy system fundamentally could not adapt to modern economic and operational demands — redesign, not repair.

A platform managers can read at a glance — including the 1 in 12 who are colorblind.

Widget-based interface

Simplified navigation, filtering, and data access — payroll budget insight without spreadsheet archaeology.

Accessibility as a requirement

Palette researched against protanomaly (red-deficient) color vision, then usability-tested for widget design, filtering, and data readability — not retrofitted later.

Built for what’s next

A greenfield system of record, fully decoupled from EDW and MSI and built on enterprise data-governance standards — ending the cycle of dependence on aging tech.

The legacy Sales and Payroll Forecasting application — The legacy Sales & Payroll Forecasting app — dense tables, hard to read at a glance.

SPM Payroll Overview dashboard — SPM’s Payroll Overview — plan vs. actual, spend, and variance at a glance, on the colorblind-safe palette.

I led the design process in Figma with iterative usability testing throughout. The platform was piloted in two districts for two weeks (Sept 22–Oct 5), refined on field feedback, then launched to the full fleet on Oct 6 — fiscal October 2024.

Enterprise tools deserve consumer-grade care.

The business case was cost — but the design case was dignity: store managers handling billion-dollar budgets deserved tools as considered as anything customer-facing. Accessibility wasn’t a compliance checkbox; it was the difference between a dashboard everyone can read and one that quietly excludes.

Replacing a system is easy to promise and hard to land. Piloting in the field before launch is what made the transition seamless.

A billion-dollar budget, managed in Excel.

Listening to the people who close the books.

A platform managers can read at a glance — including the 1 in 12 who are colorblind.

The legacy systems are gone. The savings are permanent.

Enterprise tools deserve consumer-grade care.