Designing a portal to capture construction vehicle parts life and plan for construction machine maintenance

Experience Brief:

Getting a part is not easy. Currently, demand is not able to be accurately forecasted, so parts can sit up to 6 months in a warehouse waiting for a customer to need it. If a customer needs a part that isn’t already there, they can spend up to 58 days in downtime waiting for it to go through this entire chain of events.

Duration:

4 Months

Team:

Zhiyang Li Nini Hong
Shobhit Agrawal Garrett Duarte
Jeshwanth Pranav

My Role:

Service design, UX information architecture, UI design, Stakeholder mapping, Persona building, Competitive analysis, Jobs To Be Done map (JTBD)

Final design impact

Identified a gap in the parts ordering workflow between the Volvo construction equipment dealer and the Volvo Construction warehouse. Our solution of increasing visibility into parts management helped Volvo save inventory costs by $4.5M.

UX frameworks explore

1. Stakeholder maps

2. Service design map

3. User needs statements

4. Jobs To Be Done maps

Problem statement

How can we increase the efficiency and effectiveness of parts management within Volvo CE?

“How can we help to get the right amount of the right parts in the right place at the right time? ”

Stakeholder map

Helped us identify the relationships between customers, dealers, and Volvo and how parts availability and service information flow happens between each stakeholder.

Painpoints in the current Volvo parts management workflow

Volvo has several different ticketing methods of collecting repair and maintenance issues. These different systems are typically disconnected due the variability in response from different stakeholders, and the lack of consistent keys (e.g., machine identifiers) to link the data together.

Solution

Ascend is a cloud-based system that is central to all stakeholder input. The data travels from each stakeholder to the cloud where it can be accessed and viewable across the suite. This data contributes to an engine that funnels the information through an intelligent model to forecast parts demand allowing Volvo to have predictive insights.

Ascend suite

01. Operator screen

Ascend wants to help operators with insights into the health of the machine before they start their job, so as to help them plan better, give plain language explanations to any fault code that might pop up on the machine, and also give them a platform to share their observations in the form of voice or video notes.

02. Technician screen

As the technicians see the parts at risk, they have the ability to edit the life remaining for parts at risk and keep a tab on possible parts installed for the issue that came on the machine.

03. Dealer screen

Ascend helps the dealer in giving a shared view of the issue as it happens on-site and reports that the operator or onsite technician would have recorded as soon as the trouble code showed up. The dealer also gets access to possible parts at risk for the issue that came on the machine.