Production Diagnostics
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
Process engineers are responsible for making sure the plant runs effectively. While they are expected to find ways to improve processes, they spend most of their time metaphorically “putting out fires.” They are responding to unexpected events and issues that impact production on a daily basis. Part of their role is meant to be dedicated to improving the processes, however, they have little time for enhancing when they are often stuck troubleshooting.
Process
These insights were uncovered during the discovery research I led alongside a product manager. We interviewed users and mapped out their feedback along the customer journey to understand where their pain points were and where we have opportunities.
We learned that users were not able to take advantage of a tool meant for process improvement as much as they would like because of the regular disruptions that occur in their plants.
We began working on some simple features that would help them diagnose unexpected issues faster, giving them back some time to focus on optimizing their processes. We did another round of interviews to validate our new direction and received strong signals that these features would provide value.
This led to Fero making a pivot to focus on diagnostics as the primary value proposition. The core product had been centered around live predictions and optimizations, which was still a natural next step after uncovering the root cause of an issue. (See Tactics)
Outcome
We launched Fero diagnostics as a basic visualization tool and incrementally added AI capabilities to analyze portions of the data, detect patterns, highlight anomalies, and uncover similar historical production.
Diagnostics features and new site architecture
Customers loved how much time they saved with these features. The offerings within this new product area resulted in new business, expanded contracts, and multiple enterprise deals.
Customer testimonial:
“When a team wanted to troubleshoot the source of failed mechanical quality tests, the Melt Shop and Rolling Mill spent 3 weeks going back and forth blaming each other until it finally fell through the cracks. Eventually, an engineer who was testing Fero at the time, ran the analysis on break-outs through Fero Diagnostics and found the culprit within seconds. This type of analysis would typically have taken the engineer an entire day.ˮ