Operations Co-Creation

GE's three established verticals, energy, aviation and healthcare, set beside the emerging verticals my team was formed to open: automotive, telecommunications, heavy equipment, food and beverage. It frames the business problem: a platform built on GE's own industries, and a mandate to take it elsewhere.

Emerging Verticals

• Automotive
• Telecommunications
• Heavy Equipment
• Food & Bev
• etc…

The question the team was set, in its 2022 wording: how to grow GE's industrial IoT platform and product portfolio beyond the verticals GE already knew. Everything that follows is the method we built to answer it.

How we placed design in the commercial engagement: before development, at the Qualify, Discover and Proposal stages, so product management and UX could shape opportunities early. This is the structural move the whole practice rests on.

Chris Argyris's double loop, then the engagement approach redrawn as one path from customer engagement into product development, and the anti-pattern it guards against: a release sent straight back to sales, with discovery skipped.

Three readings of the same path: product discovery moved forward into the customer engagement, the proposal drawing on both discovery and what is already deployed, and the double loop laid over the whole.

The two aims I set for the Discover phase: gather as much as possible while building customer stickiness, and keep the time between qualifying and proposing short. They are the trade-off the workshops were designed around.

Ecosystem mapping, the core design-thinking structure we developed for discovery and the one I taught the team, and the seven questions of a session, from the business or operational problem-space through the people, things and environments and how they connect, to why the current situation causes pain and how the outcome might improve, beside a room working the map.

We developed a powerful design thinking structure around “Ecosystem Mapping”. This process dives into a business domain, structures IoT components, and focuses solving an identified problem within that system. This is only one design thinking tool used during discovery workshops, but I was able to teach my team this process with success across multiple engagements.

1. 1What is the general business or operational problem-space?
2. 2Who are the people involved and their persona information?
3. 3Which physical devices or things are included in the operation?
4. 4Where are the environments in which this work occurs?
5. 5How are the people, things, and environments connected?
6. 6Why is the current situation causing pain?
7. 7How might we take this understanding and improve the outcome?

GE Digital's purpose-built space for sessions with partners and customers, in three views, one with its moving wall open. We had the room; I still preferred to work at the customer's site, and the next block shows why.

GE Digital created a purpose-built space to host these design-thinking research engagements with partners and customers.
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Four customer sites: an electrical substation in Japan, an elevator installation in Switzerland, the control room of a water desalination pumping station in Saudi Arabia and a mining tire yard in Australia. We preferred working in context, with the business owners and subject-matter experts, to working in our own space, and each place taught us something about how to work there.

As our practice matured and customers realized the value of this engagement, we conducted most of our sessions on-site and in the customer's work environment. This allowed first-hand, high-context research which improved the quality of the collected data, established deeper empathy, and forged strong working relationships. Cultural sensitivities learned: Japanese want outlines ahead of time and few surprises. The Swiss respect attention to detail in methods and analysis. Saudis will show you all they have accomplished. Australian miners want to see it work.

The case study: two days with Ford Otosan, a truck manufacturer in Istanbul. The building and an engine on display set the scene for the workshop that follows.

In this case, it was 2 days with a truck manufacturer in Turkey.

Who was in the room and what the two days covered: GE's UX, product management, country leader, account manager and solution architect across from Ford Otosan's CDO and its engineering, communications and cybersecurity leads. The agenda runs from goals and business challenges to use-cases, prioritization and a roadmap.

The goals board from day one, with the five goals as typed into the report beside it. Agreeing what both sides wanted from the two days came before any talk of solutions.

Goals

• GE Info: GE’s transformation and business model
• Collaboration: Mutual capabilities and use-cases
• Problems: Data value to fleet customers
• $-Benefit: Identify stakeholder needs
• MVP: Create a roadmap, opportunities, and KPIs

The two ecosystem sheets from Ford Otosan: the people in the domain, each drawn as a doodle-person icon with notes, then the scenarios that connect them. Drawing the people first makes a large amount of information holdable at a glance.

The whole use-case wall and three details. The use-cases were written on blue notes and placed on the ecosystem map where they belonged, so each sat in its context; the three shown ranked first, second and third in the vote.

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The prioritization board: fifteen use-cases placed by value and feasibility and dot-voted by the room, the top twelve transcribed in the ranked order. The vote was the room's, not mine; my job was to structure it so a ranking came out.

Transcribed

1. 01Provide driver services.
2. 02Provide truck data into existing fleet mgmt systems.
3. 03Provide condition-based maintenance to fleet operators.
4. 04Create performance + services package marketplace.
5. 05Provide simulation environment for R&D team.
6. 06Optimize supply chain from central warehouse to dealer.
7. 07Create truck sharing platform for drivers.
8. 08Expedite unplanned roadside maintenance events.
9. 09Develop an extensible fleet mgmt system (Co + others).
10. 10Increase transparency and communications between plant and suppliers.
11. 11Decrease warranty claims using part failure data.
12. 12Create truck consumables marketplace.

The connected plan I produced after the workshop: the top five use-cases as work streams with their outputs, dependencies and decision points over the following months. The report packaged this with the proposal, so the design and development resourcing could be argued for.

I aligned use-cases and their inter-dependencies. The workshop report is packaged to complement the formal proposal and inform additional design and development resourcing requirements.

The first example: print process optimization with Pitney Bowes, which became the first application publicly deployed on Predix. The screen is the Clarity Advisor product; the figures are the machine efficiency and yield gains it reported.

Print Process Optimization

• First application publicly deployed onto Predix
• +10% Machine Efficiency
• +20% Machine Yield
• Mail: Print, Insert, Sort
• Outcome: Maximize SLA fulfillment

The working material behind the print example: the mail process drawn as one line from planner to inserter, the discovery whiteboard with the first product screens sketched on it, and the work presented on the Predix Transform stage in 2016.

The second example: construction service scheduling with Lixil in Japan, where the team stayed engaged from pre-sales through eight releases. The wireframe is the Job Scheduler; the figures are the scheduling accuracy and cost reduction it reached, and the original users stayed in the decisions throughout.

Construction Service Scheduling

• Team engaged from pre-sales through delivering 8 releases
• 90% scheduling accuracy
• 85% cost reduction
• Outcome: Align job parameters to matched installation teams
• Validation: Keeping original users involved in decision making through/beyond delivery
• Workshop report · PDF · 32.9 MB

The scheduling work from sale to launch: a consultation at a Lixil showroom, the whiteboard from the design-thinking workshop, the refined sketch of the Job Details screen, and the launched product tested with a user at his desk.

The third example: mining truck tire repair with Bridgestone, mapped end to end across the mine site, the repair center and the logistics between them. The deal aligned the work into GE ServiceMax and cut repair time and carried inventory.

Mining Truck Tire Repair

• Multi-million dollar deal
• Reduced tire repair time and carried inventory
• Aligned into GE ServiceMax
• Workshop report · PDF · 7.2 MB

The tire-repair work in the field and the studio: on-site research at the tire repair facility, the workshop reviewed with senior leadership, and the scheduling screens refined in Sketch. The flows came straight from what the yard showed us.

The fifteen market verticals the practice worked across, from aerospace to transportation. It is the breadth the emerging-verticals mandate turned into.

The thirty-three companies named on the slide as engagements, shown as their marks in alphabetical order. The breadth is the point: the same method ran in mining, airlines, shipbuilding and consumer goods.

The two tools we made around the workshop: a playbook that lets facilitators structure agendas and add activities, and a report theme that speeds the synthesized results to customers. Both were about making the method teachable and repeatable beyond me.

The playbook's Getting Started page and nine of its activities. Each activity has a Keynote slide for the room and a Box Note that documents it in detail, so another facilitator can run it.

Design Thinking & Research Playbook

• Stakeholder Alignment
• Ice Breakers
• Capturing Outcomes
• Decision Criteria Harvesting
• Prioritization Frameworks
• User Interviews
• Persona Definition
• Role Transformation
• Ecosystem Mapping

Presenting the ecosystem-mapping method at GE Digital Day in Tokyo in 2016, with a customer map on screen. Sharing the practice with GE's commercial teams was part of the job.

GE Digital Day, Tokyo Japan, 2016

Where the practice was presented: GE Digital Day in Tokyo, the Predix Transform conference, the IDSA national conference, GE's software technology conference, and GE's commercial-team webinars, 2015 to 2016. Each event is cited where a public record of it stands.

The practice's results on one map: more than sixty workshops in eighteen countries, and over a hundred million dollars of SaaS influenced. Each figure carries what I learned: cultural sensitivity and communication, a refined and documented process, and UX earning its place in pre-sales.

• 18 Countries · Cultural Sensitivities · Communication Skills
• 60+ Workshops · Refined Process · Documented Playbook
• >$100MM SaaS · Business Outcomes · UX in Pre-Sales