Challenge
Henry Schein supplies hospitals, dentists, and clinics with everything from gloves to imaging equipment.
Most of those customers don’t just shop—they operate under negotiated supplier contracts, meaning:
They have custom pricing, pre-approved catalogs, and fulfillment schedules already in place.
Each purchase must follow rules based on that agreement—who can order, what can be ordered, and when.
Over time, these relationships look more like service contracts than one-off sales.
But Henry Schein’s legacy e-commerce platform treated every order as a simple retail checkout. Users had to re-search products, re-verify prices, and manually track compliance for each purchase.
The experience didn’t reflect the long-term business relationships that actually drive their revenue.
Objective
Re-design the platform around contract lifecycle management (CLM) principles:
make it easy for customers to see, use, and renew their negotiated agreements without leaving the buying experience.
Approach
Map the Contract Lifecycle
We defined five stages common to every agreement:
Request → Approval → Fulfillment → Renewal → Audit.
Each stage required its own interface states, notifications, and permissions.
Create Role-Based Experiences
Different people interact with these contracts—purchasers, approvers, finance managers, and suppliers.
We designed contextual dashboards and alerts for each role, reducing confusion and redundant steps.
Unify Product and Contract Data
We built a single system where catalog items, pricing tiers, and contract terms live together.
This allowed users to order confidently, knowing their purchases aligned with negotiated terms.
Extend the Design System
We added reusable components for lifecycle states: progress indicators, approval banners, renewal modals, and audit logs.
This ensured every screen reflected the same rules and data relationships.
Results
“By reframing product orders as service relationships, we improved both user confidence and operational efficiency.”
— Director of UX, Henry Schein
Platform consistency
↓ ~25 %
One shared design system across design and development teams
Results
Platform consistency
↓ ~25 %
One shared design system across design and development teams
Appendix
Our new design library and system for rapid iteration and design synchronicity
The Henry Schein e-commerce component library was built in Figma using an atomic structure—atoms, molecules, and organisms assembled into scalable templates. This shared pattern library ensured consistent styling and faster iteration across teams, keeping design and development tightly aligned and efficient.
Appendix
Implemented a robust and versatile design system and version control
Brought Teams Together
Established routine design interaction and research activities, like daily standups, sprint retrospectives and a consistent cadence of update meetings, to promote better collaboration.
Created a universal design library ensuring alignment
Formulated a procedure that incorporates expertise from Henry Schein professionals and TCS Business Analysts to highlight and handle design flaws. Collaborated with internal teams to ensure alignment and use and evolution of our design components.
Refining the DesignOps Process
Optimized the DesignOps methodology to facilitate better synergy across UX teams and simultaneous of our Figma designs, Executed routine version control checks to confirm that all design components were up-to-date and concurrent with continuous developmental requirements.
