Plan My Day

Overview

Walmart Auto Care Centers had already begun offering appointments across the chain, and customers liked the convenience. But inside the store, appointments introduced a new kind of complexity.

Service writers were no longer just checking customers in or watching a queue. They were constantly balancing scheduled appointments, walk-ins, oil bays, tire bays, technician availability, service duration, and split-service orders — often while a customer stood at the counter asking, “How long will this take?”

The old dashboard showed the work, but it did not help associates plan the day. It left experienced associates to build a mental model from scattered information, and newer associates were often left guessing.

The challenge

The original dashboard organized work by status: appointments, in queue, in service, ready for pickup, and paid. That structure worked well for tracking where an order was in the service lifecycle. It also gave associates useful details like queue position, elapsed time, service type, and status alerts.

But as appointments grew, the operational question changed.

Associates did not just need to know:

Where is this order?

They needed to know:

How does this order affect the rest of the day?

To estimate a wait time, a service writer might need to count vehicles in queue, open order details to inspect service types, remember how many technicians were working, consider whether the work needed an oil bay or tire bay, check upcoming appointments, and mentally slot walk-ins around scheduled work.

In some stores, a highly experienced associate could make a decent guess. In others, the honest answer was closer to:

What made the problem hard

Auto Care was not one queue. Oil and tire services operated almost like separate businesses inside the same shop. They used different bays, different technicians, different timing assumptions, and different constraints. A customer might see one order, but the store might need to route that order through multiple operational paths.

A customer purchasing both an oil change and tire service appeared as a single order, but operationally the work competed for two different queues.

Historically, an order could only occupy one queue at a time. Once technicians completed the first portion of the work, the remaining service often depended on someone noticing it needed to continue. Service writers had little visibility into where the second half of the order was, while technicians could easily miss that additional work was waiting.

This created unnecessary idle time between services and made combined orders one of the least predictable workflows in the shop.

My role

I was the sole designer on the initiative and worked closely with product, engineering, data science, business, and operations partners.

I partnered daily with two product managers I had onboarded, using design explorations to shape the conversation, test operational models, and align the team around what the experience needed to answer.

Alongside the screens, I translated years of store observations into a usable planning model, explored multiple ways to visualize capacity, and pushed the team toward a solution that could work with the data we had while improving as forecasting matured.

The outcome

Plan My Day launched in a pilot of roughly 5–10 stores and expanded chainwide within 2–3 months, far faster than the 6–12 months enterprise retail pilots often take.

Associates said they could finally see what they were in for each day. Requests after launch were minor refinements, not changes to the core experience.