Industrial Manufacturing Smart Phone Mobile App
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When Invensys Operations Management (IOM) set out earlier this year to develop an industrial “app” for smart phones, the company had a strong idea of what it wanted to do. IOM, the Plano, Texas-based automation supplier, partnered with Sarla Analytics LLC, Barrington, R.I., a supplier of smart phone applications, to develop SmartGlance, a software-as-a-service offering designed to deliver manufacturing intelligence data to smart phones, including Apple iPhones, Apple iPads, Blackberries and Android models.
SmartGlance was introduced in October. But before Invensys brought the SmartGlance offering to market, it turned to its customer council, a group of both large and small users of its products, for input on the app’s features and functions. “We started working with them very early on, asking what kinds of information would be most useful, and how they would want to see it,” says Rob McGreevy, IOM vice president, platforms and applications. One customer, in particularGeneral Millsstepped up to provide significant guidance and feedback, McGreevy notes, driving “some very important changes” in the app’s design.
General Mills got its first look at the SmartGlance app early last summer, says Chris Damsgard, senior engineer at the company’s Controls and Information Systems Engineering Group, in Golden Valley, Minn. “Their first pass was on the iPhone. They could show some tabular data and they could do some charting, but that was about it,” recalls Damsgard who does much of General Mills usability work. “So we started thinking about the problems that we have in the manufacturing space and how a mobile app could help us solve those, and we started explaining some of those challenges and problems to Invensys.” The vendor responded positively, making appropriate changes to the app, he says.
One thing that was missing in the early SmartGlance implementation was an alerting function, Damsgard says. While Invensys had started with a “great idea” of delivering real-time manufacturing data via smart phones, “they weren’t really totally catching the use case”that busy manufacturing users don’t have time to be constantly checking or staring at their smart phones, he explains.
Sometimes, the optimal display approaches weren’t immediately obvious. When General Mills suggested use of color, for example, the SmartGlance developers quickly thought of using red, yellow and green to indicate varying levels of equipment health. But General Mills instead pushed for just a single color to be usedand only when an anomaly occurs.
The red-yellow-green approach would have produced too much visual noise, requiring users to interpret all of the different colors, Damsgard explains. “Why not assume that things are good and shade just the one thing that I need to pay attention to?” he says. “When I open my report, I’ve got this grid of numbers, and I need to be able to go straight to the one that’s messed up, because at that moment, that’s all I care about, so that’s what the single color accomplishes.”
Damsgard anticipates significant payoffs for the project. Even a minute of downtime can amount to large costs for General Mills, he notes, “so the sooner you can get the information into somebody’s hands, the sooner they can react to prevent losses,” he says. At press time, Damsgard was hoping to begin piloting the SmartGlance app with General Mills users by around the end of November.
