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Brendan Appe

Supply Pipeline & Alert Framework

I owned and executed the end-to-end design of the Alerts Framework, including data grouping, severity logic, and escalation patterns. This became the foundation for exception visibility across the platform.
Surfaced national and regional insights with proactive alerts around trends, delays, and risks—delivered to the right teams at the right time.

As the platform matured and more data became available, we worked closely with the business and data teams to define a proactive alerting framework that could detect and surface potential supply chain disruptions in real-time.

The most critical disruption scenarios included unexpected vehicle dwell times, transit delays, capacity constraints, potential bottlenecks at plants or distribution hubs, and holds placed on vehicles due to quality or compliance issues.

Our alert framework allowed for flexibility in customizing what events were elevated to whom.

Our framework considered key contextual properties such as where in the end-to-end journey the issue was occurring, its severity, and the threshold required to trigger an alert. This logic was customized for different user groups based on their specific priorities. For example, logistics teams received alerts on bottlenecks affecting multiple vehicles, while dealers were notified of delays impacting customer orders.

Once an alert was triggered, the system automatically aggregated affected vehicles into segments based on common characteristics like plant origin, vehicle series, or geographic region. This allowed Toyota teams to quickly identify systemic patterns and take targeted action.

Top contributors to the alert would be presented by segment.

Users were then able to click into each segment to arrive at an actionable vehicle list.

Early in the process, logistics leads resisted exposing real-time delay data, worried it would trigger unnecessary escalations. I partnered with operations to reframe the Alerts Framework as a signal, not a scorecard.
By shifting the narrative toward proactive coordination and designing tiered severity logic we gained trust, cleared the feature for release, and helped teams act earlier and with greater confidence.

With this new capability teams could more efficiently collaborate, whether it was supply chain managers coordinating with logistics partners or regional leads notifying dealers about delayed vehicle deliveries. This level of transparency empowered Toyota to transition from reactive problem-solving to proactive exception management.

I led the initial MVP design for Supply Pipeline, establishing the framework for tracking vehicle status and inventory risk. As the experience matured, I handed off execution to another designer and provided ongoing direction and critique.

Fig 1/4: Supply Pipeline displayed any measures treanding outside set thresholds for raising alerts.

Fig 2/4: Clicking into an alert displayed a breakdown of the measure over time.

Fig 3/4: Root causes displayed by segment aided teams in identifying potential causes for that measure’s alert.

Fig 4/4: Clicking into a segment displays all vehicles, with a summary panel view available of individual unit records.