Sascha Demetris
Project:
During this half-semester-long project in our Service Design class, we partnered with Pennsylvania Macaroni Company (Penn Mac). Founded in 1902 as a pasta producing factory, they now serve the Pittsburgh area as an importer and curator if fine cheeses, oils, pastas, cured meats, and other Italian food products.
Penn Mac worked with our class to identify new services that their business could implement to expand their business, reach new customers, and renew the company after covid-19-related lockdowns.
Research:
To gain a greater understanding of their business, it's operations, and its position within the Pittsburgh community, we were able talk to both Penn Mac employees and customers. Through this research, we came to understand some of the key pain points for both parties. Local news articles also proved to be informative regarding infrastructure and residential demographic changes in the nearby neighborhoods.
For Penn Mac, there were issues with maintaining employees as well as earning the business of the new residents of the Strip District who were overwhelmingly younger, highly-compensated, tech-workers who appreciated the location near their office.
From the customers' perspective, they had issues accessing Penn Mac due to the limited hours of operation as well as an inconvenient location which suffers from severe traffic and limited parking availability on weekends.
Modeling the Service:
To take these research findings and create a service around the current gaps in Penn Mac's service, we created several models to help visualize service ecosystem. Below I will include the service models that I personally created.
By creating a customer journey map, we were able to identify that Penn Mac successfully serves all of the current steps of the customer's trip to the store. This allowed us to see that expanding the time/location of the business would give us the best opportunity to better serve the customers.
This led to a more concrete visualization of how the schedules of the customers do not cooperate with the schedule of Penn Mac.
We could also create a persona of a new potential customer of Penn Mac if these gaps had been eliminated.
These visualizations of the service landscape allowed us to to create a service that expanded their current curbside pickup service which had proven to be successful during covid lockdowns.
We created a scalable local pickup service that could be started as a Penn Mac exclusive service by offering grocery pickup at farmers markets. This could later be expanded by offering local pickup for products from other local Strip District businesses at either farmers markets or after normal business hours in the Strip District on weeknights.
To better explain this concept, we also created a video of what interaction with this service might look like from the customer's perspective.