DEEP DIVE A
Wheel Install
Designing a safety-critical workflow for custom wheel installations
Overview
A wheel can match the tire and vehicle on paper and still be unsafe once the vehicle returns to the road.
Aftermarket wheel installation depends on conditions catalog data cannot fully confirm. Technicians have to inspect and measure the relationship between the wheel, hub, brakes, mounting hardware, and surrounding components before deciding whether to proceed.
When Walmart explored adding aftermarket wheel installation, there was no repeatable process to guide associates through those decisions. The service had to account for safety-critical checks while supporting technicians with very different levels of experience.
My role was to identify where an installation could fail and turn that knowledge into a workflow associates could follow consistently.
Project takeaways
- Translated expert automotive knowledge into repeatable workflows
- Designed for safety-critical decision making
- Created guided validation processes for complex service operations
- Balanced operational efficiency with risk reduction
- Led discovery and workflow definition in an unfamiliar technical domain
The outcome
The workflow was approved by business stakeholders, automotive subject matter experts, engineering, legal reviewers, and Walmart’s ASE-certified Master Technician, and went into development and VQA.
