SFX – MANUFACTURING MANAGEMENT PLATFORM

Industry 4.0 means an increasingly complex and interconnected work environment, perhaps no more so than on the manufacturing floor. OCTO and Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence leveraged OCTO’s systems approach for sophisticated analysis and comprehensive exploration of the manufacturing space’s internal and external conditions.

OCTO designed a system that allows for sustainable design and comprehensive integration across all Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence software and hardware protocols.

The Smart Factory (SFx) Initiative is a cloud-based, SaaS platform that brings real time data monitoring and analytics to quality and manufacturing teams worldwide. The first solution in the SFx family, SFx Asset Management, helps quality and manufacturing teams make the most out of their measurement equipment and minimize costly equipment downtime.

OCTO was tasked with ensuring that SFx Asset Management was launched with the optimal user experience. With years of ethnographic research experiences and a dedicated software design team, OCTO was able to work alongside Hexagon’s talented team of developers to create seamless software workflows while also laying the groundwork for future solutions.

Through user journey mapping, wireframing and iterative prototyping, our team worked to bridge the digital and physical worlds and give the customer the ability to harness and exploit the IIoT data. With SFx Asset Management, manufacturing and quality teams can track their measurement machines’ operational status through the Asset Dashboard and Event Log and receive real-time notifications when critical events occur, such as machine stoppages or unexpected changes in environmental conditions.

This project required a global team across all time zones. From reviews with product management to interviews with beta sites to development hand-offs, our team remained agile and adapted to make the most of our partnership with teams no matter the time zone.

We know how critical user experience consistency and UI continuity are to ensure higher adoption, retention, and customer engagement rates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of our goals for the SFx initiative was to ensure cohesion across the entire suite of software and hardware products that make up Hexagon’s connected ecosystem and create a system that could be applied beyond a single project. The resulting design system is a collection of reusable elements guided by clear principles. This framework for building and sharing a system of UI components and standard patterns acts as a “single source of truth” that allows our teams (and Hexagon’s) to design and develop a unified range of products within the organization. With a tight sprint schedule that left little room for error, this strategy allowed us to boost productivity during the development process.