Building a platform to enable manufacturers to make more with less at Oden Technologies
How Ben's contextual design process with Oden Technologies added millions to their industrial customer’s bottom lines
The end at the beginning:
Ben led the creation of a product that factories use to increase their capacity by $8,000,000 a year.
CHALLENGE
Oceans of data but no impact
| Industry | Industrial automation, IoT |
| Timeline | 4 months |
| Activities | Market Research, Contextual Research and Design, Service Design, Product Strategy, UX Research |
| Team | Oden Internal |
| Role | Product Design Lead |
Oden Technologies was able to provide limitless manufacturing process data to its manufacturer customers … but these customers weren’t realizing the value they said they sought. Why? In an industry where a one-percent improvement meant millions in upside, what was holding them back?
The top-tier manufacturers used data to get every last drop of efficiency from their operations. Could we bring this benefit to mid-size operations?
Our task was to figure out where the gap was, if it was addressable, and if so, how we could close it. How could we increase the profit margin of an operation by $10,000,000?
Analyzing factory roles, jobs, and flow of information based on contextual research
APPROACH
Understanding how manufacturers already work … and why they aren’t working better
I began by seeking to deeply understand the lifecycle of a factory, to understand where data would be most valuable, and why it wasn’t being used. I went to factories to observe, and interviewed all the roles involved in getting product out the door. What matters, where? How are decisions made? Where are the handoff points? What tools are used?
I learned that the data required context to make it valuable, that adding context took time, and that while everyone knew there was gold in the data, urgent matters always prevailed over promising long-term efforts. A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.
I learned of tension between different roles, varying levels of acceptance/skepticism of data, and practical versus hypothetical application. I realized it was like a symphony with no conductor: everyone wanting the same outcome—a beautiful piece of music—but each musician going about it their own way. People would withhold valuable information because that’s how they kept power.
I realized the key opportunity was to vastly speed up—or skip!—the process of making sense of the data and mesh the tacit and explicit knowledge of the different roles that have to collaborate. With that, I set out to find solutions that would enable this.
SOLUTION
A platform to fuse data, practical intelligence, and theoretical intelligence
From my research insights, and after broad exploration and validation, I developed a system that allowed for all roles within a factory to see and contextualize what was happening at any moment, in realtime, and unlocked the value that factories sought in data.
IMPACT
$8,000,000 in capacity improvements to factories worth tens-of-millions and expansion of contracts
Following deployment and operationalization of these new tools, manufacturers have seen capacity increases of 8% (on $100,000,000 annual revenue) and improvements in quality that amount to a 25% reduction in cost.
Oden has seen dramatically increased success, with increased factory expansion and increase in valuation on the back of this work.
Additionally, this contextualized data is foundational to the AI and Machine Learning (ML) programs that followed at Oden, providing quality data for analysis.