Feroz Saiful

Design Thinking for Innovation-visualization tool

Visualization– tool for Industrial Automation

Challenge:   Extreme commerce (IDEEA) is a renowned food and beverage industry in Bangladesh. IDEEA  is not only a pioneer but also an industrial giant in the whole country FMCG sector. With no doubt,  their employees are very skilled and they have been with this company since beginning. Hence, the  recent cutting edge industrial models are not so much familiar to them. Still AME using manual human  based product distribution process for finished goods delivery system. Our team went there with a  proposal for a smart automated finished goods distribution solution. This reading will demonstrate  the challenges we faced and using a design tool –visualization, which tremendously helped out our  team to pass the barrier successfully.

After collecting all the legacy and running industrial data, our team prepared an auto solution project  proposal for them. But the orthodox IDEEA factory was rigid at their current position and did not accept  any system manipulation over the running system. Factory management also had a gap of  understanding how the automated process would work and unfortunately had a huge lack of  confidence about the new changes.

Interaction & Tool Selection:

Individually all of our team members were very much enthusiastic and visionary about this project. If  this project would be successfully implemented, this could be a milestone in the field of industrial  automation. So we tried to interact with all departments which were directly or indirectly connected  with the goods distribution system. Then according to our internal team discussion, we selected  visualization as a design tool for the project proposal delineation. For this project, we selected this  tool after some comparative analysis over some other tools for instance learning lunch, storytelling,  mind mapping etc.  Application:  According to Angela Myer, a successful experienced designer, Visualization tool is a non-verbal way of  communication and equally reachable to everyone. We used this tool with multiple relevant Images,  videos, diagrams, symbols and colorful sketches. So that illustration process lucidly focused on the  drawback of their running manual system and the respective department easily identified the gap and  future scope of their improvements. The HR department understood the loss of production line  efficiency due to unavailability of workers in time. In addition, company management realized the  cumulative production loss hour yearly as well.

Figure: Implementation of visualization tool at customer preach.

Our team applied this visualization tool in three different sections. Firstly, to create an overall idea  about the proposal for that we presented a flow chart of functional block diagrams describing work  process. Secondly, PowerPoint presentation for the running system drawbacks and impacts on

Feroz Saiful

Design Thinking for Innovation-visualization tool

business. Finally, an animation proposed the new setup which would eliminate the weak part of the  current setup as well the future workflow with the higher efficiency.

Insight & Approach:  There were different factory people who participated in that interaction session. The presence of  multiple departments had both positive and negative aspects. The great positivity was, any decision  didn’t hang over time for the respective team. All could participate on a current basis. But the down  side was, the factory system process was not known to all so some department people just gave a  blank look over the idea. The visualization tool worked out on this part effectively. Hence this is a  nonverbal way of communication, through the sketch, picture and animation it was practically possible  to create an imagination and correlate different parts of the thought process at their brain. So this was  the single point of understanding over the assumption. It helped a lot for describing the imaginary  prototyping of the product distribution system.

Finally, the majority of the factory department such as engineering, production, supply chain, finance  and human resource were aligned to our automatic distribution system and accepted the proposal.  This visualization is the only tool that reinforced our team goal in practical terms and made it true.  After this successful implementation, for any case where various people do not have a clear idea what  will be going to next or lack of full theme process knowledge – we try to keep using this unique  visualization tool very much.

