Factory Design Vision

What could Factory Design Utilities do in the future to deliver value to existing customers and attract new customers?

About

This page features a selection of artifacts and examples from a vision I developed to look at what a potential future could look like for the Factory Design Utilities product. It includes business insights, an assessment of the product's strengths and weaknesses, along with examples of storytelling.

Research

I started by understanding and documenting the customers' processes. To do this, I interviewed customers who use the software and below is a result of those findings:

First, I put togethers a map of the high level process:

I then worked to add details to each step of that high-level process to better understand the tasks for each step. Documenting the users process helps to ensure that all internal stakeholders are on the same page and that we fully understand the users process:

Product Evaluation

Here, I evaluated the product as it existed at the time to see how we were, or were not addressing customers problems. Below is a sampling of those findings:

Customer Problem: Customers need to manage 2D and 3D representations of their facilities.
- Solution: Our capability to sync between 2D & 3D representations today helps users to automatically manage these and the relationship between them.
Customer Problem: Costly space and interference issues encountered at build/install time.
- Solution: Our ability to aggregate various data points and perform interference checks virtually during the design phase helps to catch these issues way before build/install and avoid costly mistakes.
Customer Problem: Overall efficiency
- Solution: All of our various layout tools and automations (such as connectors, assets, 2D-3D sync, etc.) address many issues, but likely not all.
Customer Problem: Data management - managing all of the various pieces of data from factory layouts and assets to their release process and change order tracking.
- Solution: Our integration with Vault addresses these issues (with room for improvement).
Customer Problem: Many customers today rely on spreadsheets with formulas, completely disconnected from their layout designs to process plan.
- Solution: Although not well known, Process Analysis is part of the Factory Design Utilities offering today to help them move out of spreadsheets and provides simulation and real-time analysis. (one major shortcoming today, is that the data is still disconnected from the rest of the layout design)

Opportunities Identified

Here are three major roadblocks/limitations of today's solution that could be addressed:

Single User
- Today, our solution assumes it is a single user that is performing the work, and that all work activities are perfomed sequentially. It actually goes so far as to prevent users from doing some tasks simultaneously. As a result of the research performed, we now know that this is not an accurate reflection of how the users actually work. They want to get work done simultaneously and not wait until all other work is finished.
Not a True Sync
- The "sync" that happens in the solution today is actually a simple pull/push with a source always overwriting a destination. This is a main roadblock to allowing multiple users to work simultaneously.
Locked Data
- The users data is locked away in the individual CAD files. With no "single source of truth", it is nearly impossible for any downstream activities to access the data.

The Vision

The following are components of the vision that I put together to address the identified limitations.

Statement Starters

To begin, I leveraged an exercise from LUMA to develop a list of "statement starters" to help guide the design process:

In what ways might we enable collaboration and better communication?
In what ways might we help the customer manage their design data?
How might we ensure customers are successful with our software?
In what ways might we help customer complete their projects faster, more efficiently, and with fewer errors?
In what ways might we allow customers to reuse their data?
In what ways might we help customers to improve their design completeness and accuracy?
In what ways might we improve design reviews and issue resolution processes?
How might we enable customers to make better data driven decisions?
How might we provide our customers insights into their production processes and output?

The Big Picture

Storyboard | What Factory Design Utilities could be...

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The Details

Now that we have an idea of the big pitcure value we could deliver to our customers, we will take a look a bit deeper at how we might be able to get there.

Connections

A recurring theme in the statement starters and a key for Factory Design vNext is the importance of connections. Our goal is to link designs, data, and people to facilitate quicker, more informed decisions which will ultimately lead to designs that are more efficient and accurate.

The illustration above shows how we might create a central, source of truth, in the FCDE (Factory Common Data Environment). It also shows a sampling of connections that need access to this data.

Enabling Collaboration - Concurrent Design

Factory Common Data Environment: By moving the data out of the CAD files and centralizing it, we will enable collaborative, multi-user workflows across the FDU applications and beyond. This will also make the data available via Forge for other tie-ins.
Real Time Design Change Alerts: To ensure that when multiple users are working on the same layout design, we will provide real time change alerts. When a layout is modified, other users who have related work opened will be alerted to those changes and be able to update to see those changes in their context.
Conflict Resolution: While we should and will strive for a solution that avoids conflicts altogether, there will be cases that need to be covered where we will be unable to and user interaction will be required.

Factory Common Data Environment

The Factory Common Data Environment will provide the Factory Desing Utilities users the ability to collaborate simultaneously with each other and with adjacent contributers (even non-FDU users). This will eliminate the "wall" between the various stages and condense project timelines permitting work to overlap. By connecting all of the various stages in the layout lifecycle, we can eliminate errors and delays for the customers.

Real Time Design Change Alerts

Thanks to the FCDE, connected users will receive live design change alerts as the changes are made/committed. Additionally, when a design document is opened, it will be updated with the most recent changes and a compliled change list will be available for review.

Conflict Resolution

While automatic resolution of conflicts is the goal, it is unrealistic to think it will be achievable 100% of the time. If conflicts cannot be resolved, user interaction will be required to help determine which change to keep.

For example, if two users modify the same asset but different properties, we should resolve that automatically. However, if user A changes the property "length" from 96 to 104 and user B changes the same property "length" from 96 to 114, user interaction will be required to determine which change persists. Below is a very quick and dirty UI mockup to get us thinking and discussing the user interaction.

In Conclusion

The information and illustrations here were a sampling of a vision I put together for the Factory Design Utilities product. During the creation of this vision, I surveyed and interviewed many existing customers, trial customers, internal subject matter experts, and internal stakeholders to gather the data used. I then presented my findings to the internal stakeholders, which included UX leadership, the product manager and their leadership, engineering leaders and the divisions VP.

As a result of the value shown in the vision, an initial project to create and implement the FCDE was initiated and delivered. Unfortunately, after this initial step was taken which was needed to build everything else on, there was an change in leadership and then priorities which shifted resources away from the Factory Design Utilities product.