Live Optimization Configuration
Product & Design Lead: User Research, Prioritization, UX, Visual Design
Fero Labs uses AI/ML to provide insights, predictions, and optimizations to manufacturers to reduce costs, maintain quality, and increase efficiency.
Problem
When I joined, Fero’s main value proposition was real-time predictions and optimizations. The only way to configure live optimizations was through the admin panel. This was a burden on our Operations team and was becoming more challenging to maintain as our customer’s optimization scenarios were becoming more complex.
A prerequisite to configuring a live optimization is building trust. The Ops team was manually running what-if reports to help customers evaluate the risk vs. reward of hypothetical scenarios. We wanted to enable a self-service solution for this workflow as well.
Process
In collaboration with engineering, data science, and operations, we:
Evaluated the manual report generation inputs and outputs
Considered ideal output for what-if reports
Explored different user flows for generating reports
Broke the work down in milestones to deliver value incrementally
Customer journey research
User flow exploration
Site map evaluation
The final solution was Tactics. Users create tactics that define conditions and actions for live production scenarios. They can start with hypothetical scenarios and receive a summary and detailed report about what Fero would predict and recommend and what the impact would be.
Tactics created for hypothetical scenarios can then be deployed live. Actions are displayed to plant operators when conditions are met.
Outcome
Tactics reduced the report generation time from 3 hours to 5 minutes. This enabled the operations team to run more pilots simultaneously. Running these reports and demonstrating this capability helped secure Fero its first enterprise deal worth over $1 million.
List of tactics for an analysis
Dynamic tactic report
Live UI for plant operators