The challenge and selection

My company started a project in conjunction with a frozen food company in order to improve the  containers, kits and chargers that are used to move their frozen products. The frozen products of  this company are characterized by their quality and generally, with changes in temperature, they  lose the initial quality provided by the standards with which they have been manufactured. The  company has decided to design containers and transport kits that exceed the current ones and can  maintain the quality of the food that is transported over long distances, as well as in static  warehouses.

To determine the optimal temperature ranges in which the food and the containers (and kits) used  for its storage should be, the following was carried out:

1. Measurement tests were carried out, both for the temperature and the quality of the frozen  products in static warehouses, that is, at the time of production.

2. Measurements were made on the delivery routes generating random control points

3. The deliveries were tracked to the destination.

Considering the above and noting that it is a somewhat "boring and traditional" process, in order to  represent the process in a novel and simple way, it was decided to use visualization to present all  those involved and decision makers in order to obtain a feedback that allows to improve the design  of the process both from the internal and external perspective.

Application

In the first meetings, prototypes and drawings generated in CAD modeling software were first  shown to the interested parties and a feedback of the ideas generated was carried out. The general  process and the steps to follow were shown in simple diagrams and a detailed analysis of these was  performed.

Detailed reports of the kits, both materials and design options in CAD files (for interested parties)  and in simple pdf files for people unfamiliar with the program, were also sent and disseminated to  interested parties. The purpose is to also focus on the visual aspect of the designed artifacts and  also on their effectiveness.

Finally, it was shown how, through a software based on the finite element method, it can show how  the heat is distributed in the kit and animations of its evolution were shown in an experimentally  defined time considering the environmental conditions of each point. control defined above.

Insights

Showing the producer through CAD software and showing how the temperature distribution  behaves in the designed devices is a dynamic, simple and easy to understand way for interested  parties if they want to know how the product works. Having meetings with the different  stakeholders was useful to polish and rightly discard some assumptions that had been made in the  absence of the corresponding stakeholders.

In addition, there were other considerations apart from the environmental ones in the case of home  delivery of products, such as the speed at which the delivery person moves, which makes the  product's exposure time vary to different temperature fluctuations and how consequently a change  in the quality of the product. These unforeseen situations could not have been considered without  meetings based on clear methodologies showing the stakeholders directly the factors to consider in  the project.

Approach and learning

What I learned in the process was that visual tools for representation are a real advantage, especially  if simulators such as finite element software are used to dynamically represent heat transfer  processes that are difficult to understand abstractly. The same for the representation of design  prototypes.

Although the visualization process effectively fulfilled the objectives of revealing key parts of the  project, it should be considered that the tools used may be too technical for a certain part of the  project stakeholders, so before performing a visualization of the steps, it must adapt the language  to the different stakeholders.

