About ThroughPut Inc

This product enables the discovery of bottlenecks within production lines and prioritizes them based on their criticality. Powered by Artificial Intelligence, operation managers can read and derive remediation insights 600 times faster than traditional practices, thereby saving time and money.

My role

Lead Experience Designer

Requirements gathering, Product roadmap, Stakeholder workshop, Ideation, Shaping the MVP, Interaction Design, Product Pitch, Dev support

Collaborators

Ali H. Raza, CEO at ThroughPut

Bhaskar Ballapragada, CTO at ThroughPut

Anzar Kamdar, Head of Data Science at ThroughPut

The vision

To eliminate industrial bottlenecks that lead to the production of damaged goods across the globe, resulting in losses upto $10 trillion annually.

Who is this product for?

Operation Managers that are responsible for the efficient functioning of a manufacturing unit

They are subject to high stress environments that demand quick decision making

Problem statement

How might we assist an operations team in efficiently managing a manufacturing unit and guide them in making effective decisions during cut-throat situations

Key activities

We interviewed the key stakeholders to understand their perspective

Chief executive officer, chief technology officer, and the data scientist

We conducted a 3 day stakeholder workshop in which we collectively sketched mind maps on a white-board, discussed the actors with the ecosystem, studied their research insights, and ideated on initial design concepts

The organization shared their research insights that played a key role in understanding the challenges and opportunities within the system

The challenges

Expensive affair

Waste of resources

Poor remediation

Experts charge hefty amounts to investigate and detect bottlenecks

Delays caused by manual investigation result in the damages getting amplified

In cut-throat situations, poor decisions are bound to take place that prove fatal in the future

Opportunity areas

Problem solver

Seamless integration

Intuitive experience

The product should ease the operations tasks by analyzing the existing data to generate the efficient decisions

The data ingestion process must be seamless to ensure quick adoption

The product must be intuitive to use to avoid the need for any training

The operations manager

Understanding the key actor within this system

After diverging in our study, we narrowed our focus on the operation managers since they have a lot at stake in terms of daily processes and challenging decisions in cut-throat situations

Shaping the prototype

The stakeholder workshops and daily stand-up meetings provided the design direction

Following that, we derived the experience principles and subsequent product design

Experience principles

Cause and effect

Progressive disclosure

Future-proofing

The operation managers should be informed about the consequences of their decisions - they may have a negative impact on another process

The system must guide them into taking important decisions rather than leaving them overwhelmed with multiple tasks

The system must not only assist the operations in remediating bottlenecks but also future-proof the unit from any potential breaches

Key features for the MVP

Prioritization of bottlenecks

System’s recommendations

Root cause analysis

Guidance for the operations manager

The system will guide the operation managers to focus on the critical processes first

The system will suggest remediation insights for the operations manager to resolve the bottlenecks

The operation managers can dive deep into the cause of malfunction and understand how to prevent future bottlenecks

The product is designed to be self-explanatory since the majority of the employees aren’t comfortable integrating technology into their work

Visual experience design

Due to the Non-disclosure agreement, the visual design listed below is for the initial concepts

Dashboard

Process overview

The outcome

Reflections

Challenges faced and what I’ve learnt