Manufacturing & Execution System

Quick context

You might think! Being an architect / Interior design product

why we are making this ?

🎯💰1. Business Goals to make quick revenue

Exploring new and quick revenue generation ways by with minimum expense.

🆕👥2. Easy to acquire new user base

Modular furniture factories are our client's client and easily acquirable

📋✔️3. Manufacturing outputs were already built

We provide 3 main outputs required for manufacturing units in design app currently.

We already have design portal to design modular units.

👨‍🎨👷4. Addressing different personas

Needs of Interior designer and production designer separately.

Interior designer: focus on look & feel of cabinet

• Interior design (appearance and size)
• Cabinet uses (no of drawers, pullouts etc)
• To sell cabinet design for people to buy
• Don't care about how its manufactured

Production designer: focus on manufacturability

• Cabinet oriented, Construction.
• Deals with carpenters
• Cares about hardwares drills & machining
• Materials procurements etc.

Both were using the same design portal until now

🌟📦5. Completing full suite in interiors

Easy for business to buy full suite which takes care of design to manufacturing

⚡⏱6. Faster time to market

Other vertical Architecture features take years to build compared to MES.

About users

Over all work flow

Detailed flow

Eco system map

Name: Sanjay  |  Age: 35  |  Qualification: Diploma in product design

🧑‍💼 Production manager / Supervisor

Name: Ramesh  |  Age: 40  |  Qualification: Business man

✏️👷 Board cutting operator

Name: Ajay  |  Age: 40  |  Qualification: Skilled Technician

Accessibility

Since this is a design application, Our clients dont hire designer who are blind, hence not focusing on complete accessibility for blind users, But we include accessibility to temporal & situational disabilities.

Screen reader compatible

All SKU images name are coded in Alt text
alt="<Type>-<sku name>"

All images in the platform are from SKU display images. so, the same is coded in the alt text.

How it looks for low vision & color blind users

Information is not just encoded in colors, but also with icons & text. Making sure the application is workable even in the grey scale without any inconvenience.

Keyboard navigations

All options in the interface are accessible by keyboard, with an intuitive navigation order that addresses the important element first in each interface; focus state is clear and recognisable.

User Research

Factory Visits / field visit

• Pilot interview was done online with 4 users and basic questionnaire was made.
• Visited Wake fit, factory @Hosur, & 3 other local factories in Bangalore.
• Conducting user interviews
• Observing workflows in person
• Understanding whole process and touch points

User Interviews & affinity

• Initial 5 Interviews with Internal customer success reps, our user proxies
• Focus group 1: 8 participants, From different parts of the factory
• Understanding the pain points and users needs in detail in each part of the flow.
• Focus group 2: 7 participants, From different parts of the factory
• Transcription and affinity mapping were done.

Insights of production designer

• Hard to check 1 by 1 since objects are scattered in design
• Remembering units which are verified
• Editing requires a lot of clicks & juggling in the design app portal
• Handling frequent interior design changes
• Creating and Managing multiple work orders
• Verify, edit and give sign off to production
• Coordination with both manufacturing side & Interior designer.

Personas

Production designer

Sanjay

Age 28 · Delhi, India

I make sure any designed cabinet can be manufactured easily

Pain points

• Units are scattered in design, hard to check 1 by 1
• Remembering verified units — editing means juggling clicks
• Handling frequent interior design changes

Needs

• Creating & managing multiple work orders
• Verify, edit & give sign off to production
• Easy coordination with manufacturing & interior designer

Tools

Cut List optimiserSaw / CNCGoogle sheetsCAAD

Qualities

Detail-orientedTech savvyManufacturing-awareCollaborative

Production manager

Ramesh

Age 40 · Delhi, India

I focus on quality and timely delivery of modular furniture to my clients

Pain points

• No big picture or real-time feedback of factory operations
• Giving frequent inputs to the operators
• Errors going unnoticed

Needs

• Track order progress end to end
• Track each operator’s efficiency
• Managing rejections & breakdowns
• Plan and schedule work to operators

Tools

Google sheetsAccounting softwareProject planners

Qualities

LeadershipBusiness orientedRelationship-drivenHandles volume

Floor workers

Ajay

Age 38 · Delhi, India

I bring life to cabinets — from wooden sheets to furniture in your house

Pain points

• Hard to handle paper documents on the factory floor
• Time and effort to calculate dimensions & cutting order
• Getting the right information at the right time

Needs

• A guide to speed up work
• Aid to prevent mishandling
• Streamlined process to reduce time
• Get recognised for good work

Tools

Factory machinesHand toolsDrawingsWalkie-talkie

Qualities

Quick at tasksHands-onLow-tech comfortHandles volume

User journey

Detailed user journey map of product designer

Prioritising user needs

Since it is a huge product, the user needs had to be prioritised for implementation.

Iteration and solution

Aligning with stakeholders

• Combined brainstorming
• Ideation & Design iteration in my own focus time.
• Wireframes are frequently tested with in-house customer success for quick user feedback
• Frequent design discussion with CTO and PM
• Card sorting to figure out Ideal Information architecture
• Initial version is released in stage environment for beta user testing
• Feedbacks were collected and improved upon in next releases

Wireframes and wireflows of iterations

Information architecture

Several rounds of card sorting were performed to finalise the information architecture

Visual design

Visual Design

• Existing design system is catered especially to Design portal, need for new visuals for this MES app.
• MES users need clean and simple UI
• Rather than building a DS from scratch, used the Material Tailwind Design System.
• It has minimal & clean interface, legible, bigger & less distraction.
• Free & allows customisation
• Ready to deploy in design & development faster
• Some minor tweaks were done in design system.

Prototyping

• Prototypes were used to test the design with the Customer success reps and users
• Post which initial version was released in stage environment for beta user testing
• Feedbacks were collected to improve it through iterative process

Usability Evaluation

Task success rate and path analysis:

• All events were logged in Mix panel
• Checking the task flow and drop of rates using Mix panel user flow analysis feature
• Some defined task flow funnels are:
  • Work order creation flow
  • Publish flow
  • bulk edit SKU structure
  • Downloading CNC and board layout

Think aloud & Retrospective testing

Some changes done based on user feedbacks

Flow: A. Create work order from design

User Feedback:

Entering design link was hard for users, requires lot of communication with interior designer

Changes made:

a new flow where interior designer publish the design which is available in the selector for product designer

• In-person survey conducted with each user at different stations of the factory
• 3 product designer 7 Operators

Net Promoter Score

Collaboration

Stakeholder Collaboration

Developer sign off

Details annotations & walkthrough of designs

Spacing guides

Managing files

Challenge Faced

Conflicts with Developer

• After a design walkthrough and design freeze.
• One of the developers had a problem while implementing the design.
• He asked me to remove the 2D or 3D view port.
• He mentioned it would not be feasible for a few months.

Proposed Design

Users can see the cabinet in detail, along with all the required panel info at once — clear layout and sectioning for cabinet level and panel level.

How I approached this challenge

Final redesign:

• Redesigned the layout to have one canvas at once.
• along with that preserving the context of 2D and 3D based on old state.
• 30% Bigger space for 3d and 2d ports.

Defining Product Success Metrics

No of work orders created from Design

Why: Proportional to adoption of the MES system

No of panels / units added to production

Why: Proportional to revenue. We are charging per panel

No of outputs downloaded

Why: Indicates usage of the system

No of panels tracks / scanned

Why: Indicates that operators are working on the panels

Data events are logged in Mix panel for tracking

Adoption and Retention metrics in initial 6 months

Increase in “panels added” in past 6 months

476% increased from start From 42K to 240K

Ratio of “panels added” to total no of users.

15% increased from start 3.54 to 20.33

Data of All Output downloaded

(Board download clicked and CNC files downloaded)

Usage of tracking feature

(panel cutting, CNC, Edge band packaging)

Impact on business! (Revenue metrics in initial 6 months)

Comparing data from 1st week to 6 Months from the release date.
Revenue shown below is only for processing fee of the panels, MES addon fee is not included.

Source: Data from Infurnia Mix panel.com *Revenue shown only for process fee of panels