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Remote Monitoring for Endress+Hauser
Smart software that helps businesses keep an eye on their devices and equipment and predict & troubleshoot issues from the comfort of their homes.
Role
UX Strategist, Product Manager
Duration
10 Weeks
Team
3 members
Tools
Figma, Miro, Slides
Introduction
The Mobile Water treatment market, valued at $1.5 billion, is growing at a rate of more than 12% CAGR. We worked with the client Endress+Hauser who is developing a remote monitoring software and at the time was looking to customize its end use as per their customers’ needs.
The customer we were working with, MPW Industrial Water Services, headquartered in Hebron, OH, owns a fleet of trailers equipped with mobile/ portable water skids, and they need to monitor not only the device ecosystem of the water skids, but also need to keep track of the trailers in real-time.
The Research
This project involved working in a very niche and specialized leg of industrial Internet of Things within the water treatment industry.
So, first things first, we delved into enhancing our understanding of the water monitoring industry, what a water skid looks like and how mobile water treatment systems work, using tools like Business Model Canvas and Environmental Analysis.
Market Trends
Market trends in automation & technology indicate that more of water treatment businesses are adopting intelligent asset management
Technology Trends
Digitization and automation is happening rapidly due to the advancement in AI and 5G technologies that also enable remote monitoring
Market Forces
Customer relationships and competitive pricing are a priority due to tech giants entering the market with an upper hand in terms of technological power
Interviews with the client & their customer informed us about
what system requirements the users need and who those end users are.
The secondary research and primary research informed the thematic analysis using affinity mapping that helped us identify these themes.
Sarah Stones
The maintenance supervisor at MPW wants a centralized system to collate the data that all devices are constantly collecting and get insights on them.
Mark Manson
The on-field technician at MPW faces hurdles in monitoring the trailer health despite being on-site, due to the difficult to decipher HMIs (human machine interfaces) and paper copies of trailer builds.
We synthesized our research into personas, customer profiles and empathy maps and identified 3 key users, outlining their needs or challenges, their jobs & duties and their business goals.
Matt Watson
The Operations Engineer at E+H helps clients troubleshoot their devices with in-person meetings but would like to provide proactive assistance and have a holistic view of devices sold remotely.
Ideation
The ideation stage was a challenging and complex process since we had to think of various aspects of innovation in terms of tech and function, while also keeping in mind different user needs of our three personas.
01
Brainstorm
The individual and group brainstorming sessions all in all produce 50+ ideas, after looking at those we saw certain patterns emerging
02
Cluster
We clustered the ideas and discovered that the individual ideas were either about system features, data points, data representation, what technology to use or dashboard features.
The clusters put us in a fix, since each of the features could be mapped and represented with any of the other ideas. AND we had three different sets of user needs to think of in the midst of that!
So we spent 3-5 days (significant time in a 10-week project) just trying to make sense of how to combine the ideas and narrow them out into full-fledged idea systems and eventually came up with a process to devise 'solution systems'
03
Solution Systems
We listed out the feature set on one side and technologies on the other to device solution ‘systems’.
04
Mapping to Pain Points
Then, we mapped out which pain points every solution system was addressing for each of our personas to finalize three solutions.
What the process of devising the solution systems and mapping to pain points looked like
Next, we evaluated the final 3 solution systems using a radar chart.
The evaluation of the Value Propositions for each of the three was based on efficiency of the system in catering to pain points of the customer, ease of scalability in terms of technology and functionality, cost of development and learning curve for the users - the best fit is the one that maximized efficiency and scalability while minimizing costs and learning curve.
The Solution
The best fit out of all the ideated solutions was NWNI+ or Netilion Water Network Insights Plus, a water systems monitoring solution that adds remote monitoring using AI, 5G and IIoT capabilities to E+H’s NWNI software (under development at the time).
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Dynamic Maps
Map views for easy region-based system overview
Netilion integration
Data received from Netilion Value, Netilion Analytics and Netilion Health
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3D Representation
3D views of trailers & equipment setup
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GPS-enabled tracking
DI trailers real-time tracking using GPS capabilities
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Centralization of Data
One interface for monitoring all key data points
AI & ML
Intelligent reports and trends generation for predictive analysis
Prototype
Business Model
How E+H can offer NWNI+ as a software solution to clients
We proposed a subscription model to the E+H team for monetizing the NWNI+ offerings.
The subscription model offers a Silver, Gold and Platinum plan with different features, functionalities and E+H tech support being offered.
The Platinum subscription offers maximum capabilities and full tech support.
Assessing the Business Model
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Conducting a SWOT analysis on the proposed business model, we found some important insights:
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The solution has a strong & reliable revenue model and solves critical pain points for customers.
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The solution is easy to scale up in terms of functionality and tech in the future.
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However, there are tech giants like Microsoft & IBM who would be quick movers and hence a threat to E+H.
Challenges, Learnings and Impact
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Every day of the 10 week project was infused with multiple challenges and learnings for me. Every week I was challenged to use my UX design and research skills, while becoming a temporary subject matter expert in the water monitoring & manufacturing industry - all the while learning new business tools and applying those to the weekly deliverables first-hand. To say that these 10 weeks were paced like a bullet train would be an understatement.
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I improved on my client presentations, learnt how to be succinct yet thorough in sharing insights and solutions and the biggest learning of all was developing processes to make sense of a large amount of information that is thrown at you! I was also fortunate to have 2 equally dynamic and proactive teammates and each of us helped out bring the best in the other in our collaborative efforts.
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The proposed solution was appreciated by the client and has been shared at the global E+H headquarters in Switzerland. The manufacturing mammoth plans on incorporating certain modules of NWNI+ and expanding their current offerings based on the insights gathered during the project.