Challenge Summary
Welcome to "Vulcan - Nerve Center App Refinement Design Challenge". This Design Challenge is a follow-up challenge to a recently completed RUX challenge to concept a Nerve Center/Command Center for the Vulcan Company. In this challenge, we are looking to continue refining and improving on the interactions for the Nerve Center based on the provided feedback and guidance.
Read the challenge specification carefully and watch the forums for any questions or feedback concerning this challenge. Let us know if you have any questions in the challenge forum!
1. General Updates
2. Maestro Nerve Center Routine Interactions & Workflow
- As part of your checkpoint submission, you must upload your submission to MarvelApp so we can provide direct feedback on your designs. Please include the MarvelApp URL in your notes.txt.
- Make sure all pages have correct flow. Use the proper file numbers, (1, 2, 3, etc.)
1. General Updates
2. Maestro Nerve Center Routine Interactions & Workflow
- As part of your Final submission, you must replace your checkpoint submission with the final submission into MarvelApp so we can provide direct feedback on your designs. Please include the MarvelApp URL in your notes.txt.
- Make sure all pages have correct flow. Use the proper file numbers, (1, 2, 3, etc.)
Background Overview
Vulcan is a company that is implementing new technologies and digital transformation within their factories and plants. To execute these plans, Vulcan is preparing 2 strategic initiatives, which are:
1. Create a "collaboration tool" between Vulcan Technician and Experts. (See the working progress from the following RUX48 and RUX51 challenges)
2. Create a "Nerve Center" or command center room in their headquarters, that will monitor, react and predict all things related to IIOT connected devices (assets) within Vulcan factories and plants (We already start the initial work in the RUX50 challenge)
Challenge Goals
We are looking to continue refining and completing the Nerve Center user flow and interactions.
Nerve Center Short Description
- The Nerve center (NC) will become the central intelligence unit for the Vulcan company asset management operation
- Our Vision for the NC is that it will be connecting and orchestrating the global operations for 100+ plants/factory and 1500+ machines
- In the beginning, NC will focus on the following:
Key Concept: People and Assets (IIOT machines) are the key elements of the Nerve Center. We do not want to "drill down" but we want to explode upward from the Asset to understand and tackle issues quickly
User Personas
Nerve Center Room (see photos)
- Maestro (In-Scope), Orchestrates the operational flow in the nerve center with some AI assistance. Works in sync with other Maestros. A Maestro can support 3 activities in parallel.
- Nerve Center Facilitator (In-Scope), On duty employee that see live things happening in the NC. they will funnel Maestro requests and enable work to get done, real-time reacting.
- Diagnostics Expert (DE) (out of scope), When the maintenance team faces a machine failure and cannot understand its root cause, the DE is the first one to look at the failure. Minimum output expected from him/her is to let the nerve center know what kind of expertise is needed given the diagnosis. It is very likely to have DEs in the nerve center who can trigger SME associations.
Factory Persona's (In Scope)
- Technicians: Onsite, The technicians work at the plant. They help the DE to understand the problem, follows diagnostics instructions, solves the problem together with the Expert (SME). The Technician sends an SOS if they need assistance (we assume the Technician follows the internal process and gets the required approvals internally in the plant).
- Subject Matter Expert (SME): Onsite or Remote, Has deep vertical expertise on a matter like 'software problems in laser cutting machines'. The expertise is defined at least 2 dimensional: asset classes + problem classes. She takes over the problem once the DE has a diagnosis.
Nerve Center Support (Out of Scope)
- Note we have support roles that help put knowledge into the Nerve Center App - Improving the Nerve Center base knowledge. Potential roles in the support would be:
Design Consideration
- Need to refine and improve the provided UI
- Big screen application (follow design best practice for the big screen)
- Easy to navigate and read information
- Easy viewing for pages that may be over overcrowded with information
- Color, shape, icons - the importance of quickly understanding the data
Challenge Forum
If you have any doubts or questions regarding challenge requirements, please ask in the challenge forum:
https://apps.topcoder.com/forums/?module=ThreadList&forumID=651644
~
Design Requirements
For this challenge, we are looking for the provided features and interactions to be captured in the Nerve Center as we will want to demo this experience in the future. The screen functionality listed is suggested functionality for consideration. As we are continuing to refine the story please continue to look for design efficiencies in the experience. If there is a better way to accomplish the same goal, then feel free to take creative liberties.
General Updates
- We are looking to combine the 1st and 2nd place designs and continue refining the overall Nerve Center GUI and experience. It is up to you as to what you want to use as a base. We will provide design guidance in the forum about 01-271916 and 02-271911
Important: The GUI needs to be more enterprise/corporate and less "video game". We still will want the futuristic approach (colors, transparency, shapes) but not all the extra graphic ornaments.
- 01-271916 - change all text "Failures" into "Critical", make sure the data story is correct and consistent across all screens
- 01-271916 - Prefer to see leads and WIP at the same time, right now the winning design proposed it as a tab which makes it harder to go back and forth between tabs (P5.png and P6.png)
- Work in progress (WIP) can have parallel activities for a given lane
- Colors beginning to be very clear/visual guides - Needs to be able to quickly understand the status and also know by shape/icon what something might be. Refer to the (02-271911) - You can see this in the Work in Progress chevrons and the Experts rectangles and the factory diagram - things really stand out!
- Backlog refers to leads that Maestro decided to take action but has not taken action yet. What you have as the 'backlog' are the predefined activities, it is good to keep them, but needs a UX solution.
Maestro Nerve Center Routine Interactions & Workflow
Assets KPI
1. The Maestro should be able to quickly see the Asset KPIs at a glance. The KPI’s show assets that are vulnerable to having issues, assets that are Off Target, SOS assets and also assets that might be okay but now have an SOS. The Maestro should have the option of being able to use the KPI table as a filter all of the assets on the Nerve Control screen.
Asset Leads
2. The Maestro will then be able to focus on the Asset Leads to see current issues and potential threats. The Maestro can select an item in this table, and see the Asset Status vitals associated with it and the Asset Logistics which show any recent Asset Work Orders associated with it, if any.
Definitions: Asset Work Orders are items being created by the Asset (what does it make in the factory etc.) If an asset is not working it will affect many Work Orders that need to get done using that asset.
Issue Backlog
3. The Maestro can then make a decision to send any of the Asset Leads to the Issue Backlog or start creating a Work In Progress workflow to be addressed by an Expert and/or Technician. They will base their decision on the urgency of the issue and the production schedule in the Gantt chart. Maestro can also see what experts are available and directly assign them work.
4. In the Issue Backlog screen, they can see the current status of an asset that is waiting to be serviced. Again when an asset in the Backlog screen is highlighted, it’s vitals and the current work orders associated with it are visible and easily accessed.
Work in Progress (WIP)
5. The Maestro can also see the Work in Progress of the various assets, but can select and highlight different sections of the workstream, and can get a detailed view of all the particular tasks within the workstream. Use color codes: Red - Needs to be done, Yellow - In progress, Green - Completed
6. When the Maestro selects and highlights a section of the Work in Progress, it acts as a filter showing the experts who are most qualified and available to fulfill the task. Maestro can choose to assign work to the expert. They can see what else they are currently working on, to make sure they can handle any additional workloads. The expert’s schedule should be visible, showing the times and amount of hours they are available. This will be helpful for the Maestro to make a decision on who to assign work.
7. Include a feature for a progress report that the maestro can access to get an overview of the moves that they have made for the day and see the work progress. They should also be able to see an overall analytics report reflecting long-term performance. (see progress report sample.jpg in the documentation)
Asset Status
8. The Asset Status section is important to show the Asset data/reading and the data over time. This helps to track the data and see when anomalies have occurred. Make sure to show a situation in the data when 2 or more anomalies have occurred.
Asset Logistics
9. The Asset Logistics show the Work order information of a highlighted or selected asset. It gives a more detailed view of the work orders, like if it has been completed. If there is a delay, it will show the reason for the delay.
10. The Asset Logistics Factory Map shows the routing of the different asset work orders. If the Maestro wants to see a specific WO route he can click on that WO in the Logistics area to highlight it on the Map. Please see the map design in 05-271884 as we thought this was captured well (its not correct) but the visual was done well.
Asset Logistics Gantt Chart
11. Below is the description of how the Gantt chart should work. The Gantt Chart is available in 01-271916, p5.png and p6.png (at the bottom right of the screen)
- See Gantt Chart reference from this link
- The Gantt chart should have a timeline with days, shifts, hours and minutes as the smallest unit. Once we have a good Gantt chart, we can focus on how we can tie in commercial and financial KPIs. To illustrate:
- Need a marker that shows the shipment date over the LINE
- Need marker for the total slack for a given route. Consider all the ‘waiting time’ through the route plus planned time in storage
- If a route has 8 hours of wait time and 24 hours of time planned in storage before shipment, we have 32 hours to solve a problem without delaying the shipment
Importance: What's important with the Gantt chart is to see the slack/float. For the concept of slack/float refer to this link for more explanation
- Slack/float means how much activity can delay without causing delays on the project.
- Slack/float is basically the total free areas between asset work orders (WO) on the same route including the time in storage.
- In our production context, float that means how much a WO can wait due to a repair and still do not cause delays in the shipment.
- Spent less time on the flow of selecting activities and appointing people to an activity
- Needs to showing dependencies between activities on the Gantt chart. These dependencies can be shown by simple connectors that connect start-finish points of activities. To give more detail, there are 4 types of dependency:
-- Start to Start – means two activity should start at the same time
-- Start to Finish – First activity cannot start earlier than second finishes (very unusual)
-- Finish to Start – second activity cannot start earlier than the first finishes
-- Finish to Finish – both finishes together
-- This dependency is important, it helps us see the route of work orders on the schedule.
~
Important:
- Keep things consistent. This means all graphics styles should work together
- All of the graphics should have a similar feel and general aesthetic appearance
Marvel Prototype
- We need you to upload your screens to the Marvel App
- Please send your marvel app request to fajar.mln@gmail.com (Challenge Copilot)
- You MUST include your Marvel app URL (in your marvel app prototype, click on share and then copy the link & share it with your notes/comment this link while you upload)
Branding Guidelines
- Use the 1st place as the design base
- Improve the 1st place design using 2nd place (we like how the 2nd place make user quickly understand the status and also know by shape/icon what something might be)
Documentation
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BfbSEwBiJSnhHzFA_qm-jsLyEHMmTncA?usp=sharing
- Previous RUX Winners (Design Reference and Base Design)
- Gantt Chart References
- Plant and Machine Images References (Use these as images for the plant and machines in your design)
- Nerve Center Room Photos
- Screen References Folder
- Progress Report Sample.jpg
Target Devices
- Big Screen in Command Center Room (see photos in documentation)
- Resolution: 4K Display (16:9 screen ratio) - 3840x2160px or 1920x1080px is fine for this challenge
- Use grid systems for your layout
Target Audience
- Vulcan Company Employees
Judging Criteria
Your submission will be judged on the following criteria:
- Overall idea and execution of concepts
- How well does your design align with the objectives of the challenge
- Execution and thoughtfulness put into the solving the problem
- The overall design and user experience
- Cleanliness of screen design and user flow
- Ease of use
Submission & Source Files
Preview Image
Please create your preview image as one (1) 1024x1024px JPG or PNG file in RGB color mode at 72dpi and place a screenshot of your submission within it.
Submission File
- Submit JPG/PNG image files based on the Challenge submission requirements stated above
- MarvelApp link for review and to provide feedback
Source Files
All source files of all graphics created in either Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, XD or Sketch and saved as an editable layer
Final Fixes
As part of the final fixes phase, you may be asked to modify your graphics (sizes or colors) or modify overall colors
Read the challenge specification carefully and watch the forums for any questions or feedback concerning this challenge. Let us know if you have any questions in the challenge forum!
Round 1
Submit your initial design for a Checkpoint Feedback1. General Updates
2. Maestro Nerve Center Routine Interactions & Workflow
- As part of your checkpoint submission, you must upload your submission to MarvelApp so we can provide direct feedback on your designs. Please include the MarvelApp URL in your notes.txt.
- Make sure all pages have correct flow. Use the proper file numbers, (1, 2, 3, etc.)
Round 2
Submit your Final Design plus Checkpoint Updates1. General Updates
2. Maestro Nerve Center Routine Interactions & Workflow
- As part of your Final submission, you must replace your checkpoint submission with the final submission into MarvelApp so we can provide direct feedback on your designs. Please include the MarvelApp URL in your notes.txt.
- Make sure all pages have correct flow. Use the proper file numbers, (1, 2, 3, etc.)
Background Overview
Vulcan is a company that is implementing new technologies and digital transformation within their factories and plants. To execute these plans, Vulcan is preparing 2 strategic initiatives, which are:
1. Create a "collaboration tool" between Vulcan Technician and Experts. (See the working progress from the following RUX48 and RUX51 challenges)
2. Create a "Nerve Center" or command center room in their headquarters, that will monitor, react and predict all things related to IIOT connected devices (assets) within Vulcan factories and plants (We already start the initial work in the RUX50 challenge)
Challenge Goals
We are looking to continue refining and completing the Nerve Center user flow and interactions.
Nerve Center Short Description
- The Nerve center (NC) will become the central intelligence unit for the Vulcan company asset management operation
- Our Vision for the NC is that it will be connecting and orchestrating the global operations for 100+ plants/factory and 1500+ machines
- In the beginning, NC will focus on the following:
- Enables hyper-speed collaboration among Vulcan Employees and Experts. For example, a Chinese CNC specialist will become available for supporting a solution to a rare CNC problem in Poland in less than 10 minutes. The collaboration will be enhanced by AR and real-time translation technologies
- Predict and prompt machine failures
- Captures tacit knowledge and digests it into structured knowledge for the company to learn at a global scale
- Compares and contrasts asset performance from multiple angles, identifies top performers, elicits what top performers do differently, absorbs and disseminates this knowledge
- Enables hyper-speed tactical decision making in times of emergency and operational disruptions
- Predict and prompt machine failures
- Captures tacit knowledge and digests it into structured knowledge for the company to learn at a global scale
- Compares and contrasts asset performance from multiple angles, identifies top performers, elicits what top performers do differently, absorbs and disseminates this knowledge
- Enables hyper-speed tactical decision making in times of emergency and operational disruptions
Key Concept: People and Assets (IIOT machines) are the key elements of the Nerve Center. We do not want to "drill down" but we want to explode upward from the Asset to understand and tackle issues quickly
User Personas
Nerve Center Room (see photos)
- Maestro (In-Scope), Orchestrates the operational flow in the nerve center with some AI assistance. Works in sync with other Maestros. A Maestro can support 3 activities in parallel.
- Nerve Center Facilitator (In-Scope), On duty employee that see live things happening in the NC. they will funnel Maestro requests and enable work to get done, real-time reacting.
- Diagnostics Expert (DE) (out of scope), When the maintenance team faces a machine failure and cannot understand its root cause, the DE is the first one to look at the failure. Minimum output expected from him/her is to let the nerve center know what kind of expertise is needed given the diagnosis. It is very likely to have DEs in the nerve center who can trigger SME associations.
Factory Persona's (In Scope)
- Technicians: Onsite, The technicians work at the plant. They help the DE to understand the problem, follows diagnostics instructions, solves the problem together with the Expert (SME). The Technician sends an SOS if they need assistance (we assume the Technician follows the internal process and gets the required approvals internally in the plant).
- Subject Matter Expert (SME): Onsite or Remote, Has deep vertical expertise on a matter like 'software problems in laser cutting machines'. The expertise is defined at least 2 dimensional: asset classes + problem classes. She takes over the problem once the DE has a diagnosis.
Nerve Center Support (Out of Scope)
- Note we have support roles that help put knowledge into the Nerve Center App - Improving the Nerve Center base knowledge. Potential roles in the support would be:
- Data Scientist
- Data Science Developer
- Deployment Person (programmer)
- Training and Quality Expert
- Technical Exec
- We left off the descriptions - can provide them if you feel they will help you with your concepts.- Data Science Developer
- Deployment Person (programmer)
- Training and Quality Expert
- Technical Exec
Design Consideration
- Need to refine and improve the provided UI
- Big screen application (follow design best practice for the big screen)
- Easy to navigate and read information
- Easy viewing for pages that may be over overcrowded with information
- Color, shape, icons - the importance of quickly understanding the data
Challenge Forum
If you have any doubts or questions regarding challenge requirements, please ask in the challenge forum:
https://apps.topcoder.com/forums/?module=ThreadList&forumID=651644
~
Design Requirements
For this challenge, we are looking for the provided features and interactions to be captured in the Nerve Center as we will want to demo this experience in the future. The screen functionality listed is suggested functionality for consideration. As we are continuing to refine the story please continue to look for design efficiencies in the experience. If there is a better way to accomplish the same goal, then feel free to take creative liberties.
General Updates
- We are looking to combine the 1st and 2nd place designs and continue refining the overall Nerve Center GUI and experience. It is up to you as to what you want to use as a base. We will provide design guidance in the forum about 01-271916 and 02-271911
Important: The GUI needs to be more enterprise/corporate and less "video game". We still will want the futuristic approach (colors, transparency, shapes) but not all the extra graphic ornaments.
- 01-271916 - change all text "Failures" into "Critical", make sure the data story is correct and consistent across all screens
- 01-271916 - Prefer to see leads and WIP at the same time, right now the winning design proposed it as a tab which makes it harder to go back and forth between tabs (P5.png and P6.png)
- Work in progress (WIP) can have parallel activities for a given lane
- Colors beginning to be very clear/visual guides - Needs to be able to quickly understand the status and also know by shape/icon what something might be. Refer to the (02-271911) - You can see this in the Work in Progress chevrons and the Experts rectangles and the factory diagram - things really stand out!
- Backlog refers to leads that Maestro decided to take action but has not taken action yet. What you have as the 'backlog' are the predefined activities, it is good to keep them, but needs a UX solution.
Maestro Nerve Center Routine Interactions & Workflow
Assets KPI
1. The Maestro should be able to quickly see the Asset KPIs at a glance. The KPI’s show assets that are vulnerable to having issues, assets that are Off Target, SOS assets and also assets that might be okay but now have an SOS. The Maestro should have the option of being able to use the KPI table as a filter all of the assets on the Nerve Control screen.
Asset Leads
2. The Maestro will then be able to focus on the Asset Leads to see current issues and potential threats. The Maestro can select an item in this table, and see the Asset Status vitals associated with it and the Asset Logistics which show any recent Asset Work Orders associated with it, if any.
Definitions: Asset Work Orders are items being created by the Asset (what does it make in the factory etc.) If an asset is not working it will affect many Work Orders that need to get done using that asset.
Issue Backlog
3. The Maestro can then make a decision to send any of the Asset Leads to the Issue Backlog or start creating a Work In Progress workflow to be addressed by an Expert and/or Technician. They will base their decision on the urgency of the issue and the production schedule in the Gantt chart. Maestro can also see what experts are available and directly assign them work.
4. In the Issue Backlog screen, they can see the current status of an asset that is waiting to be serviced. Again when an asset in the Backlog screen is highlighted, it’s vitals and the current work orders associated with it are visible and easily accessed.
Work in Progress (WIP)
5. The Maestro can also see the Work in Progress of the various assets, but can select and highlight different sections of the workstream, and can get a detailed view of all the particular tasks within the workstream. Use color codes: Red - Needs to be done, Yellow - In progress, Green - Completed
6. When the Maestro selects and highlights a section of the Work in Progress, it acts as a filter showing the experts who are most qualified and available to fulfill the task. Maestro can choose to assign work to the expert. They can see what else they are currently working on, to make sure they can handle any additional workloads. The expert’s schedule should be visible, showing the times and amount of hours they are available. This will be helpful for the Maestro to make a decision on who to assign work.
7. Include a feature for a progress report that the maestro can access to get an overview of the moves that they have made for the day and see the work progress. They should also be able to see an overall analytics report reflecting long-term performance. (see progress report sample.jpg in the documentation)
Asset Status
8. The Asset Status section is important to show the Asset data/reading and the data over time. This helps to track the data and see when anomalies have occurred. Make sure to show a situation in the data when 2 or more anomalies have occurred.
Asset Logistics
9. The Asset Logistics show the Work order information of a highlighted or selected asset. It gives a more detailed view of the work orders, like if it has been completed. If there is a delay, it will show the reason for the delay.
10. The Asset Logistics Factory Map shows the routing of the different asset work orders. If the Maestro wants to see a specific WO route he can click on that WO in the Logistics area to highlight it on the Map. Please see the map design in 05-271884 as we thought this was captured well (its not correct) but the visual was done well.
Asset Logistics Gantt Chart
11. Below is the description of how the Gantt chart should work. The Gantt Chart is available in 01-271916, p5.png and p6.png (at the bottom right of the screen)
- See Gantt Chart reference from this link
- The Gantt chart should have a timeline with days, shifts, hours and minutes as the smallest unit. Once we have a good Gantt chart, we can focus on how we can tie in commercial and financial KPIs. To illustrate:
-- Days – 24 hours
-- Shifts – 8 hours
-- Hourly tickmarks – 1 hour
-- Time – a minimum unit of time for the whole Gantt. Wos can start at 04:42 and finish at 8:21
- Plant layouts should end with 2 common assets. Assume these two as packaging and storage. Storage ends with a LINE that shows shipment. We can assume shipment is instantaneous-- Shifts – 8 hours
-- Hourly tickmarks – 1 hour
-- Time – a minimum unit of time for the whole Gantt. Wos can start at 04:42 and finish at 8:21
- Need a marker that shows the shipment date over the LINE
- Need marker for the total slack for a given route. Consider all the ‘waiting time’ through the route plus planned time in storage
- If a route has 8 hours of wait time and 24 hours of time planned in storage before shipment, we have 32 hours to solve a problem without delaying the shipment
Importance: What's important with the Gantt chart is to see the slack/float. For the concept of slack/float refer to this link for more explanation
- Slack/float means how much activity can delay without causing delays on the project.
- Slack/float is basically the total free areas between asset work orders (WO) on the same route including the time in storage.
- In our production context, float that means how much a WO can wait due to a repair and still do not cause delays in the shipment.
- Spent less time on the flow of selecting activities and appointing people to an activity
- Needs to showing dependencies between activities on the Gantt chart. These dependencies can be shown by simple connectors that connect start-finish points of activities. To give more detail, there are 4 types of dependency:
-- Start to Start – means two activity should start at the same time
-- Start to Finish – First activity cannot start earlier than second finishes (very unusual)
-- Finish to Start – second activity cannot start earlier than the first finishes
-- Finish to Finish – both finishes together
-- This dependency is important, it helps us see the route of work orders on the schedule.
~
Important:
- Keep things consistent. This means all graphics styles should work together
- All of the graphics should have a similar feel and general aesthetic appearance
Marvel Prototype
- We need you to upload your screens to the Marvel App
- Please send your marvel app request to fajar.mln@gmail.com (Challenge Copilot)
- You MUST include your Marvel app URL (in your marvel app prototype, click on share and then copy the link & share it with your notes/comment this link while you upload)
Branding Guidelines
- Use the 1st place as the design base
- Improve the 1st place design using 2nd place (we like how the 2nd place make user quickly understand the status and also know by shape/icon what something might be)
Documentation
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BfbSEwBiJSnhHzFA_qm-jsLyEHMmTncA?usp=sharing
- Previous RUX Winners (Design Reference and Base Design)
- Gantt Chart References
- Plant and Machine Images References (Use these as images for the plant and machines in your design)
- Nerve Center Room Photos
- Screen References Folder
- Progress Report Sample.jpg
Target Devices
- Big Screen in Command Center Room (see photos in documentation)
- Resolution: 4K Display (16:9 screen ratio) - 3840x2160px or 1920x1080px is fine for this challenge
- Use grid systems for your layout
Target Audience
- Vulcan Company Employees
Judging Criteria
Your submission will be judged on the following criteria:
- Overall idea and execution of concepts
- How well does your design align with the objectives of the challenge
- Execution and thoughtfulness put into the solving the problem
- The overall design and user experience
- Cleanliness of screen design and user flow
- Ease of use
Submission & Source Files
Preview Image
Please create your preview image as one (1) 1024x1024px JPG or PNG file in RGB color mode at 72dpi and place a screenshot of your submission within it.
Submission File
- Submit JPG/PNG image files based on the Challenge submission requirements stated above
- MarvelApp link for review and to provide feedback
Source Files
All source files of all graphics created in either Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, XD or Sketch and saved as an editable layer
Final Fixes
As part of the final fixes phase, you may be asked to modify your graphics (sizes or colors) or modify overall colors
Please read the challenge specification carefully and watch the forums for any questions or feedback concerning this challenge. It is important that you monitor any updates provided by the client or Studio Admins in the forums. Please post any questions you might have for the client in the forums.