Authorization Tracker 2.0

The Challenge

Before Authorization Tracker 2.0, roughly 200 users across about 10 manager-led teams tracked retail product authorizations in a single shared Excel workbook. Every CDM and field marketer was reading from and writing to the same file: status updates collided, version history was unreliable, and there was no way to tell who had acted on an initiative or when. As the organization's retail strategy grew to cover Innovation programs, Retail Promotions, and Sustaining Look of Success requirements across thousands of store locations, the spreadsheet model could not scale. There was no role-based access, no delegation, and no real-time visibility into where an authorization stood in the approval chain.

The 2.0 rebuild was not just a visual refresh. It needed to replace a manual, error-prone process with a governed system of record that teams would actually trust enough to abandon the spreadsheet entirely.

The Approach

I partnered with a business analyst to define requirements: which pages were needed, what information each role needed to see, and how the workflow tracks should be separated. From there I owned the UX and UI design end to end, building the wireframes, page flows, and brand-aligned UI for the full application. The 2.0 architecture introduced three distinct workflow tracks, Innovation, Retail Promotions, and Sustaining LOS, each with its own data model and authorization logic, accessible through a single unified interface.

A central design challenge was the Customer Collection system: a way for teams to define, save, and reuse custom store groupings across multiple initiatives and promotions. This required careful information architecture work to make the creation, editing, and association flows intuitive without adding friction to the daily authorization workflow. The new Local Data Management tools gave bottler administrators direct control over execution detail categories, zone definitions, and super channel configurations. User management was rebuilt with a delegated permissions model, allowing administrators to manage CDM and marketing role access at a granular level. The monthly tracker view was expanded to give teams a full fiscal-year picture of authorization status, store participation counts, and execution percentages in a single scannable interface.

The Outcome

Once Authorization Tracker 2.0 launched, the shared Excel workbook was retired. All roughly 200 users across the 10 manager-led teams moved onto the new platform, which gave each role its own permissioned view instead of one shared file everyone was editing at once. Approval and authorization workflows that used to depend on manually updating and reconciling a spreadsheet moved noticeably faster, since status changes, store groupings, and execution data were now tracked in one governed system instead of being re-keyed across versions. The result was a more scalable, more accountable authorization workflow built to support a distribution network operating at a scale very few organizations ever reach.

Selected screens

Wireframes from the production application, covering the three workflow tracks plus the two systems described above.