GE Maintenance Optimization
How might we help companies reduce maintenance costs, prevent failures, and increase machine availability and reliability?
Customers, especially in the Power and Oil & Gas industries, want to reduce their maintenance costs while extending the life of their assets. Maintenance Optimization is the third component of an Asset Performance Management product, and the functionality leverages the other two APM components. It also integrates data from other maintenance-related systems to provide predictive capabilities.
Role
My role focused on refining the product strategy, validating assumptions and conducting user research to ensure alignment across product, design and engineering teams. This work occurred concurrently with the design and development of the first product release.
Team
Primary team: 1 product manager, 2 interaction designers, 1 design director
Secondary team: APM design team
Sketches
Multiple people, systems and decisions are involved in a company's maintenance optimization efforts. Based on discussions with subject matter experts and customers, I visualized the activities involved in optimizing maintenance. I sketched maintenance processes and workflows to validate a common understanding across the team.
Workflows
After immersing myself in learning about maintenance processes by talking to subject matter experts, customers, and attending a conference, I learned that customers can approach maintenance on a spectrum from reactive to predictive. I further fleshed out these workflow approaches to better understand their commonalities and differences.
Ecosystem Map
Because I learned that multiple roles, software, databases, and processes involved in planning and executing maintenance, I decided to create an ecosystem map to visualize all actors involved. The map captured the complexity, but didn't effectively capture the complexity in an easily understandable way for the viewer. I explored other methods and decided to transform it into a service blueprint.
Service Blueprint
Creating an initial service blueprint revealed that some unresolved questions remained. I shared the blueprint to collect feedback from SMEs and PM, and realized that the blueprint may evolve as we learned more from our customers. The artifact elevated discussions between and within the APM product management and design teams by helping to pinpoint questions and establish a clearer vision for maintenance optimization.
Lessons Learned
Maps are a useful tool to create a shared understanding across stakeholders, customers, and internal teams.
Different types of maps lend themselves to different visual communication problems.