Worximity

Design sprintIndustrial IoTPrototype
Hands holding a tablet beside a bottling line, showing the maintenance dashboard prototype
A design sprint to turn machine data into a preventive maintenance offer, for two audiences at once.
  • 1design sprint, then a prioritization
  • 2audiences: plant maintenance and machine makers
  • 2clickable prototypes, built in a day
  • 8weeks from proposal to roadmap
Worximity puts sensors on production lines and shows plants, live, how well they run. The data was already there. The offer wasn't.

In 2022, Worximity's product team wanted to explore preventive maintenance. Many plants still fix machines after they break, which costs more than planned maintenance. Worximity's sensors already counted hours and cycles on every machine. The question was who would use that data, and what they would do with it.

A design sprint was the fastest way to find out: one week with the people who know the product, the customers and the sales, to decide, prototype and look at the result together.

Prototype diagram: the machine services provider and the factory maintenance director, connected by Worximity through machine cycles and hours
The idea in one picture: the plant and the machine maker, connected by the same data.
One question to start. Worximity's sensors already knew how hard every machine worked. Could that data become a preventive maintenance offer people would pay for?
Two sides of the same machine. The plant's maintenance director wants to avoid breakdowns. The machine maker wants to sell service at the right time. Both read the same data.
A prototype per side. On day four, the team built two clickable prototypes: a maintenance dashboard for plants, and a sales tool for machine makers.
Then, prioritize. After the sprint, what the team learned became a prioritized plan, delivered at the end of June.

Inside the sprint

Worximity's team around the same table. Every idea started on paper and on sticky notes, and the strongest sketches became the screens of the prototype.

The sprint team around a long table in a loft office with wooden beams, sticky notes on the glass wall
The team at work in the sprint room.
Yellow sticky notes in French on a glass wall, questions about machine makers grouped under Flexible and Documenter
The questions about machine makers, sorted on the glass.
Paper sketch of the dashboard: critical threshold overview with three machines at 40% and 75%, and the next and last maintenance dates below
The dashboard on paper, before it became the prototype.
Paper sketch of an asset page: total hours and cycles, last and next maintenance, contact person and a maintenance offer, with green voting dots
An asset page, with the team's votes.
Paper sketches of quarterly bar charts by client, and a client view showing the cycles of four assets
Cycles by client, for the machine maker.

Prototype 1 · For plants

Maintenance at your fingertips

For the maintenance director: see which machines are close to their limit, get an alert before it's too late, and book the vendor directly.

Prototype dashboard, Critical threshold overview: four asset cards with gauges for hours of use, cycles and percentage of use, one in red past its threshold
Every asset at a glance. Red means it's past its maintenance threshold.
Prototype screen: booking the annual maintenance of an asset with the vendor's technician, with a calendar, time slots and an estimated cost
Book the maintenance with the vendor's technician, without a phone call.
Tablet showing a Maintenance due alert: annual maintenance, with buttons to schedule it with the vendor or assign a team member, over an anonymized mock-up of plant maintenance software

Prototype 2 · For machine makers

The same data, as a sales tool

For the companies that build and service the machines: know which customer needs what, and when, from how their machines are really used.

Prototype landing page for machine makers: Improve your pipeline and exceed your sales goals
For machine makers: the same data, as sales opportunities.

Prototype screens from the sprint. Names, figures and quotes in them were placeholders, and the plant software behind the alert is an anonymized mock-up.

The other conclusion

No interface is the best interface

Plants and machine makers already juggle plenty of software. A new dashboard, however good, is one more login, one more training, one more tab nobody opens.

So the sprint also landed here: let the data travel to where people already work. APIs that connect Worximity to the tools each side already uses, so customers don't have to learn new software, or pile up yet another one.

Where Worximity is today

Worximity still sells its production monitoring platform to manufacturers, built around OEE tracking, with quality, giveaway and forms modules. Its site lists no preventive maintenance offer and no product for machine makers. It does describe APIs that send machine data to a plant's ERP, MES or maintenance software. Details from worximity.com.

Two prototypes, a prioritized plan, and the whole Miro board handed over so the team owned every sticky note.

Credits

Design sprint facilitation and prototypes
Jean-Sébastien Daigle · &friends
Design sprint facilitation and prioritization
Éric Letarte · &friends
Client
Worximity