Reflection – Visualization

Challenge and Selection

My company is dealing with supplying instrumentation to oil and gas industry. We had launched a new  product that is designed to be used for partial stroke of critical shut off valve in the process plant. As the  design concept is new, we are facing challenge to train sales engineer to master the knowledge on the  operation and data interpretation on the system. In order to help to sales team and our customer to  understand the product clearly, we decided to make use of the visualization tool from video by Angela  Meyer as guide to improve on product training module and preparing the demo sets for customer. We  selected a group of people consist on sales engineer, product expect and marketing manager to form  the working group. We also invited few customers from different technical background to experiment  the concept that had come out with.

Design Stage

The project started off with the technical expert preparing simple control diagram of various partial  stroke design that had been use in the industry. The purpose of the diagram is to help people from  different technical background to be able to understand the concept behind each system easily. We also  use a combine diagram to make comparison of all solutions available in the marker against our new  product. This will help them to see clearly what is the similarity and difference between each solution.  As a result, the sales engineer will find it easy to explain to their customer on the benefits of the new  product and how can the new product replace some on the old solution them have in their plant.

We move on to consolidate the diagrams into PowerPoint presentation and also included in comparison  chart of our new product with other solution. Some of customer like to learn more about our product  even bring us to their plant to show us their current solution that they are using. They explained us the  problem and challenge that they are facing.  We were allowed to take photograph from the plant that  help us to prepare a clear presentation on the how installation can be carry out on site.

Design Implementation stage

We move on to have group discussion by viewing through the presentation slides. All member that the  opportunities to give their view and understanding of the training material. By adding the right pictures  and wording, the training material start to take shape fast. The marketing manager get help from his  graphic designer to prepare simulation on the product to further enhance the impact to viewer. Once  the training material completed, the team move on to look at preparing a demo set.

As all team member agreed that the best way to learn about the product is to use it. Since this is a new  product and we do not use it before, the technical engineer start sketched out process valve and  actuator that can be coupled to our partial stroke system. He also added in other essential components  that are required to make the demo set work. Knowing that the demo set need to keep to lowest  possible weight to ship around, all team member help to look for different kind of product and material  can be used to build the demo set. The technical engineer prepared the 3D illustration and presented to

the team, from the 3D illustration team member can see clearly how the demo set looks like. Brain  storming session help to further improve the design and cut down 35% weight of the initial design.

Execution phase

We have selected 2 of the sales engineers to be the product champion for this project. With the  presentation material and demo set that are ready, we start running some trial on giving a full  presentation and conducting the product demonstration. Marketing manager use a video camera to  record down the whole process. Once the presentation finish, we had conducted a full review on the  presentation. We listen to the script, look at diagram, study the chart, look at the simulation and finally  study the demonstration. We use simple line diagram to help mapping out viewer understanding on the  solution we are trying to explain. The diagram helped us to identify some of the points that we need to  enhance. It also pointed out some of area that we do not explain very clearly. After few rounds of  review, we finally able to get the version presentation that is effective, interesting and easy to  understand. The team also get very hands on with the demo set. By showing the demo after the  presentation it give a deep impression to the audience on our solution.

Field Launch

Sales team and marketing team had prepared the launch plan, one of the key things is to prepare a  brochure for the new product. The material we had earlier give us a great help to provide critical  information required on the brochure. They also selected 3 important customers for the soft launch. A  survey from is prepared to record customer feedback after the presentation session. After completed  the 3 sessions, we found that the feedback from the customers is very close to our expectation. They  had given some valuable feedback on the diagram show in the presentation help them to relate the  product to some of the problem they face on the current system. All of them give a positive feedback on  the demo set as it can demonstrate some of the common issue they faced in their plant. The result  shown by graphical output from our product really convince them how our product can overcome those  issue they faced.

Review and lesson learn

The visualization tools we selected by using diagram, simulation and video proved that they are effective  for this project. These tools allow us to share our ideas and let others understand easily. The diagram  helped to make easy comparison between different product the system. The visual simulation allowed  us to see different possibilities when design the demo set. Video recording allow us to review our  presentation process and problem that could happen during demonstration. When customer see and  use the demo set, they do not have the feeling that we are trying to sell them the product. They are  keen to know about the product and like to try it out in selected area to see how the product can solve  their problem.

With these success from the visualization, I believe from the information and data we had gather from  our customer, we can use mind mapping to find new solutions which are important to our customer.  These may give us an opportunity to come out with an innovative idea that will change the industry.

