iOps.
Integrating people and tech to optimize manufacturing operations
Manufacturers face a variety of challenges that can affect efficiency, quality, and profitability, including:
Labor Shortages: Difficulty in finding skilled workers and high turnover rates.
Equipment Downtime: Unexpected machine downtime, high maintenance costs, and insufficient predictive maintenance systems.
Quality Control Issues: Defects, inconsistent product quality, and lack of robust quality management systems.
Technological Integration: Challenges in adopting or upgrading to Industry 4.0 technologies (IoT, AI, automation).
Deloitte's IntelligentOps™ platform leverages automation, analytics, and AI to help companies address these challenges. By connecting disparate systems and data sources, it provides organizations with real-time visibility into their operations, enabling them to streamline processes and make data-driven decisions that drive efficiency and improve overall performance.
Current Work.
In my role as a UI/UX designer for the Smart Manufacturing Studio, I'm currently working on a range of projects, including system design initiatives like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and a custom notification system, as well as enhancing modules such as Predictive Maintenance.
System Design: Role-Based Access Control
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) plays a crucial role in protecting an organization’s security, improving efficiency, and ensuring compliance when it comes to managing resource access. iOps is currently dealing with two key challenges related to RBAC. First, users have been managed through the legacy interface of the original Smart Factory Accelerator, which iOps was built from. Second, iOps has taken a modular approach to RBAC so far. However, as the platform has expanded in both functionality and scale, this modular approach is starting to cause issues with flexibility and scalability. This brings us to the question: how can we implement a more unified approach to RBAC?
Working in collaboration with the product and development teams, my responsibilities lie in designing the user interface for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) configuration, focusing on creating an intuitive, streamlined experience for administrators managing the permissions and roles of users.
Some key goals of the project include:
a singular approach for the platform
make it simple for administratiion
System Design: Custom Notifications
Effective notifications are crucial for keeping users informed and boosting operational efficiency. Much like RBAC, we're facing two main challenges here. First, notifications are still being managed through a legacy system inherited from the original Smart Factory Accelerator. Second, users currently have limited options for customizing their notifications. To address this, we're focusing on how to enable users to create persona-based, customizable alerts for both raw and calculated data the platform can access, providing greater flexibility and a more unified notification system.
I’m collaborating closely with the product and development teams to design early notification concepts that align with RBAC (role-based access control) permissions and user flows. Once I’ve established clear design guidelines, I’ll shift into a supporting role, handing off the designs to my design colleague who is aligned with the development pod to continue the work. My ongoing responsibility will be to ensure alignment with RBAC requirements and maintain consistency across the design.
Some key components of this project include:
Enhancing the user-facing push notification and notification center experience.
Creating a user-facing notification dashboard where users can view, filter, and manage all of their notifications.
Designing a configuration system that enables system administrators to manage existing notifications and set up custom, role-based alerts.
Additional Work.
Module Design: Digital Tiered Meetings
Managers and team members spend countless hours each day preparing for the many daily meetings that keep a manufacturing plant running. Data is often manually pulled from siloed, with varying standards across plants. This can make it challenging to get a clear and accurate view of what is happening. How can we show show real-time data and and action tracking?
Solution overview: A digital board that seamlessly integrates with existing systems, offering real-time visualizations of key factory metrics and an integrated action tracking system.
We collaboratively generated ideas, created wireframes, prototyped, and iterated. With input from client services, product, and development, we ensured alignment with user needs, business goals, technical feasibility, and consistency with the iOps design library and platform patterns.
My role: I worked with product consultants to create user story flows and designed prototypes from low- to high-fidelity in collaboration with the client services, product, and development teams. I also worked to ensure design standards were met for a consistent user experience and brand alignment across the platform.
Solution overview: The solution involves enabling the configuration of platform appearance directly through a user-friendly configuration UI. This interface allows users to select default themes, upload custom logos, choose accent colors and fonts, and configure web display settings. This approach aims to streamline the rebranding process, making it more efficient and user-centric.
My role: In collaboration with a product and design, I designed a high-fidelity prototype. This prototype demonstrated the configurable components of the platform and illustrated how changes would impact the platform's appearance. The prototype served as a visual and functional guide to ensure that the configuration UI met user needs and aligned with the overall design goals.
System Design: White Labeling
At it’s core, IntelligentOps is an accelerator: companies can leverage it’s base platform and/or individual use cases to build upon. Regardless of the level of adoption, organizations have a desire for iOps to match the consistent look and feel of their existing brand and products. Previously doing so, would require additional effort by the development team. As we continue to scale, we founds ourselves asking: how can we allow for more efficient customization of the platform for business needs through the UI rather than through significant redevelopment efforts?
Design System.
iOps Design Library
The IntelligentOps library and design system is a dynamic resource that the design team constantly refines to meet the platform’s growing needs. This includes improving reusable components, updating UI elements, and enhancing design guidelines. These updates streamline workflows, ensuring consistency and efficiency across design and development teams. By reducing redundancy and increasing scalability, we continue to create a more cohesive user experience.
