IVL
STAR CEMENT is an ISO 9001:2008, ISO 14001 & OHSAS 18001 certified company. It is the largest manufacturer of cement in the North East of India. The owned plants are located at Lumshnong, Meghalaya and Sonapur, Assam. It is having two hired grinding units at Siliguri and Durgapur. A new owned plant is being set up at Siliguri, West Bengal. The annual turnover of the company is approx. 1500 crore/ 15 Billion INR.
Siemens Ltd pitched a product to Star Cements to help automize their cement plant and better manage the inbound and outbound activities of materials.
The name of the project is short termed as IVL which stands for “Integrated Vehicle access control cum Logistics management system”.
IVL was just one layer of the automation of their plant. IVL communicated with SAP and hardware modules from Kemar Automation which handled all the hardware and sensors for this project.
My Role: UX Lead, Individual Contributor
Duration: January 2022 - May 2022
Platform: Web, Mobile
Design Tool: Adobe XD
Problem
Star Cement needed a digital product to better manage inbound and outbound activities of material from their cement plants which will facilitate their plant automation. The system should be able to communicate with the hardware automation system as well as the SAP database.
Challenges
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The transformation from Existing manual operation with word of mouth and SAP/MS Excel files.
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Digitalization was missing in the existing solution.
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This solution was supposed to run at 3 plants of StarCement but with slightly different operating methods.
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This complex application has 4 major functionalities /workflows to cater to.
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There are 7 user groups of this application with varied age groups, literacy, and tech savviness.
Journey
Star Cements is an external customer of Siemens Ltd. The IVL project was initiated in late 2021, and I was involved in it as UX Lead starting in January 2022.
Star Cement needed a digital product to better manage inbound and outbound activities of material from their cement plants which will facilitate their plant automation. The system should be able to communicate with the hardware automation system as well as the SAP database.
We started the project with stakeholder workshops to get a good understanding of their requirements. This helped us to map the requirements as per the priority.
Then we visited their site to better understand their processes and also interact with the actual users of this entire ecosystem. Based on the interaction, initial wireframes were designed and tested with users to check whether the conceptual model is matching with their mental model.
After this validation, realistic visual designs were designed in Adobe XD and the clickable mockup was tested with the users. Parallelly, the design specifications were shared with the development team for implementation.
Process
Design Guidelines
I followed the Newton Design System designed and maintained by the Brandville team of Siemens AG.
The design system is more specifically designed for the sales & marketing website of Siemens, but can also be used for Siemens web applications with minor tweaks.
Objectives
The objectives of this project are
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To restrict and control vehicle movement through any of the main and internal gates
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To improve goods vehicle turn-around time
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To eliminate human errors
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To reduce dependency on manual labor
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To trace, analyze and control the time consumption of goods vehicles at each stage inside the plant
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To get real-time delivery confirmation
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To improve the efficiency of the packing plant
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To ensure that no material or equipment can move out of the plant without authorization
Personas
Here, we’ve identified 7 personas:
1. Transporter
2. Driver
3. Logistics officer
4. Sales & Dispatch officer
5. Stores officer
6. Admin
7. Security / Data Entry Operator
Workflows
This system will have four major functionalities which can be divided into the following four.
Transporter Management
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Transporter places goods vehicles.
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Transporter views the real-time status of in-plant vehicles.
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Transporter prints invoices, consignment notes, weighing slips, etc.
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Transporter generates transportation bills by consolidating invoices and delivery challans.
In-plant Vehicle Management
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Controlled entry and movement of vehicles in the plant
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Realtime tracking of workflow activities
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Automated validation and notification in case of trespassing identification
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Operator-less weighbridge operations
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Automated invoice generation along with accessory documents
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Realtime loading process tracking and error proofing
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Securing coal yards through validations and tracking
E-POD & Billing process tracking
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Realtime transit monitoring
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Realtime delivery time captured through an OTP-based process
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Tracking and communicating stages of transporter bill processing
Hardwire & Network Management
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Dashboard to view device and network health
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Alarm in case of failures
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Audit trail for activity logging for each device
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Communication via SMS and mail in case of attention required
Conclusion
IVL can also be treated as a SaaS application and it has scope in every industry which is automated and involves inbound and outbound movement of the materials. It can prove to be a good ecosystem for such industries.
