Engineer
When a part on my line has failed, I want the order for that one part in front of me, where it is and when it lands, so I know whether I am opening the machine today or planning around it.
Case 03 · Industrial B2B
The part is cheap.
The stopped line is not.
Research and vision concepts for ERIKS Gateway, a self-service portal for the people who keep factories running. A production line that stops can cost more in an hour than a year of the parts that keep it turning.
Where this started
You cannot specify a job you have never watched.
None of it had ever been properly validated. There were opinions about what these customers needed, and nothing to check them against. So before I designed anything, appointments were made at customers’ plants, and a colleague and I went to look.
We interviewed on site and came back with the job as it is actually done: the steps people take, the tools they already trust, how a decision gets made and who has to be in it. Then, role by role, what each person is trying to achieve.
The first finding was not that a plant holds several roles, but how differently each one meets the same stopped line. The engineer at the machine, the buyer in advance, the manager across plants. Tell all three the same thing and you are wrong twice.
The same thing, in their words
Situations, not features.
A feature list invites argument about the feature; a job story invites argument about the situation. A couple of example job stories below, out of a much longer list.
Buyer & planner
When I am planning ahead, I want to see which orders have slipped before anybody asks me, so I can move a delivery or a maintenance window while there is still time to move it.
Procurement manager
When delivery performance drops sharply at one site, I want to hear about it without logging in, so a bad month does not reach me once it has become a bad quarter.
The second finding
They did not need another portal.
Research earns its keep when it comes back with something the brief did not ask for. That is where the budget stops going into features nobody would have used unless they had to.
Most industrial-size plants already run portals for everything, each with its own login and its own password to lose. One more would have been another account rather than less work.
So I changed the question: not what this one should do, but how much of it needed to be a portal at all. Part of the answer was email — a different one per role, carrying the few things that role can act on without going anywhere.
The portal that was left starts with what is going wrong. If uptime is what is at stake, the orders worth showing are the ones threatening it, so the overview leads with those and the full list sits one level down. Every page was held to the same rule: manage by exception.
What management got to react to
A clickable prototype, built to be argued with.
What we handed over at the end of the research was a vision document and the presentation around it. These fifteen screens are that vision made clickable: something management could move through and react to rather than read, showing what we believed an answer to their customers’ situations could look like — and what ERIKS’ own expertise and advantage could be worth inside it. It stands for a direction, not a build.
Next
The other cases.
Three years of paperless maintenance in a KLM hangar, and a self-service portal that had to read in both directions.