Bubbles for production

Select your components – this is what most of us enjoy when purchasing a new product. Customization is what customers demand, whether it is a car, a bicycle, a so-called white good, or an electronic device. Manufacturers are able to meet this market demand through mixed production lines where multiple product variants are produced on the same line. The people responsible for the optimal efficiency of those lines are the manufacturing engineers. They have a lot of responsibility: They need to prevent bottlenecks and minimize human and machine idle time. 

Noga Bar-On, Varda Senerman, and Hadar Hillel from Siemens Digital Industries Software in Tel Aviv developed a User Interface (UI) that improves the daily workflows of manufacturing engineers: The UI lets them visualize multiple workstations in a way that makes it fast and easy to spot balancing issues and to realize their level of severeness. This leads to better decisions that are taken faster. Noga, Varda, and Hadar are awarded for their novel approach as “Inventors of the Year 2021” in the category Design and User Experience.

The product the three award winners contributed to is called Easy Plan.“Easy Plan provides key capabilities to manufacturing engineers,” Noga explains, “in this example, it enables them to balance mixed production lines easily.” The Senior UX Expert highlights the importance of the collaborative working mode that the UX designers share with the product owners: “The key to designing suitable solutions is having an excellent understanding of our users. We need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes.” She describes this as a big challenge since their users are professional engineers that work in highly specialized domains. 

“The product owners and product managers are our partners for this. They are the industry experts, continuously working with our customers, and they deliver all the necessary knowledge to us.” For example, for the line balancing topic, they were working closely with Sivan Freud. “Easy Plan is a very rich application suite, providing key capabilities to support and execute manufacturing planning,” Sivan explains. “It is designed to support different kinds of manufacturers. The industries differ in their manufacturing manners, and Easy Plan can be configured to provide a solution which would be accurately suitable for a specific customer.”

The portion relevant to the innovation of the two designers and the scrum master relates to balancing a production line with different variants produced in parallel. Manufacturing planners constantly need to assign tasks to workstations, and they were in need of spotting and fixing balancing issues: stations that are over- or under-utilized. “Our variant time distribution chart gives the manufacturing planner a visual image of the balancing state of an entire line,” Varda Senerman explains. She also works as a Senior UX Expert. “It is visualized in a way that lets him quickly and easily spot the issues and understand their severeness.” Their UI invention allows to visualize the workload and the probability of every product variant in a workstation. 

And here comes the clue: “All that information is visualized through an innovative bubble chart diagram,” Hadar Hillel says. She is the Scrum Master that works with Noga and Varda. “The user sees rows of bubbles, where each row represents all variants in a single station. The size of the bubbles represents the probability of a product variant. Its position represents the load of a workstation.” Compared to previously existing solutions, this visualization combines several advantages. For one, it visualizes probability and not just workload. In addition, it is very compact since all variants are laid out on a single row. Adding more variants does not result in an additional scroll. “This leads to a rapid understanding of the situation and better decisions.” 

Collaboration and passion characterize the working mode of Noga, Varda, and Hadar. “Sometimes creativity can happen very fast,” Varda answers when being asked how they can be creative at the touch of a button. “And sometimes it needs a second or a third try,” she adds. “For the bubble feature of Easy Plan, we first went through a completely different idea. It was nice and creative, but we realized usability faults. So, we wanted to provide a better solution. The actual game-changing idea of the bubbles then developed in only one hour in which the three of us locked ourselves up in a room.”