Incident Management & Alerting
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.
Process engineers are responsible for making sure the plant runs effectively. While they are expected to find ways to improve plant operations, they can spend extended periods of time troubleshooting a particular incident and most of the time, it is too late to intervene. The hope is to avoid the same issue going forward. Fero makes the investigative process faster, but still there may be multiple related events that span days or weeks. Currently the handling of these investigations is very manual.
I conducted user research to understand how process engineers discover, monitor, diagnose, and prevent production issues. From my research, it was clear there was not a standard practice in place. Discovery could be a failed test result with limited time to act. Monitoring could be eyeballing some charts. Diagnosing could take weeks of tedious data analysis. Prevention could be instructions written on a whiteboard for the plant operators.
Engagement doubled after the release of email alerts and reports.
We saw all these issues as opportunities at Fero. To start, we introduced an email alert any time Fero generated a new prediction and also provided daily recaps which helped with discovery and monitoring.
Failure Risk Report
Next, we added more types of alerts and ways to manage and view the alerts within the app. At first, the alerts were purely rule-based notifications. After validating these new alert types were useful, we began enhancing them with AI. Alerts based on single data points automatically included a list of similar historical production. Multiple points were aggregated into production zones.
The alert detail became a hub for tracking investigations and collaborating with colleagues. We added the ability to customize the content so users could add more relevant information and added commenting.
These new workflows led to the conversion of individual plant contracts into Fero’s first $1m+ enterprise deal.