Gantri Manufacturing Software

Background

Gantri is a digital design manufacturer that makes and sells on demand 3d printed lights. These lights are made from biodegradable material that is specially made for printing light fixtures.

The Project

I joined in 2021 to help overhaul design across the company and introduce a improved internal MES tool to streamline operations across departments including the factory and marketing.

The Problem

Introducing a new suite of software to improve quality and productivity across the company.

My Role & The Team

Director of design working along side 2 product designers, a team of brand designers and creatives, and 2 dedicated frontend engineers from 2021-2022

Background

Gantri's mission is to empower designers to bring designs to life with the use of on demand 3D printing techniques, Gantri is able to manufacture numerous unique products faster and more efficiently. This allowing Gantri to reduce waste, reduce Co2 emission, storage space, man power and ultimately cost.

Gantri's software ecosystem

The admin product sat alongside other software that supported various parts of the business.

The process started with designers summiting product designs via the CreateHub tool. Once they are approved they then migrate to our admin tool for manufacturing, then lastly over to our marketplace site for purchase.

Examples of where Gantri admin MES software is used

In the factory, the admin software is used in every department. From printing, to finishing, to assembly and even shipping.
The team mostly used chromebooks and tablets as they worked around the factory.

Examples of the internal "admin" tool before joining

Above is an example of the various admin dashboards that existed. These dashboards were used to track performance and issues they may occur.

Above are examples of the detailed pages within the admin portal. Including manufacturing process pages and designer profile pages.

Above are examples of the jobs portion of the admin portal. This is where the staff would track and update stock orders as they were being made.

In addition to the admin software at the time, alot of the staff still relied heavily on spreadsheets to track work. This got to a point very few were actively using the admin site.

Core problems needing to solve

-Provide a software solution that meets the needs of the various departments
- Improve the visual design so the interface is more accessible to the staff
- Explore and push ways to make the software more automated and effective in order to improve productivity & quality

Research

First thing I did was sit and talk with each department head and production supervisor to make sense of what were the biggest issues and where they see admin playing a role.When I joined Gantri, the role the admin tool played was more of a reference of what to do rather than a true real time source of truth. When orders were made from the marketplace jobs were automatically made for teams to execute, but often teams would just take this info and execute from outside spreadsheets. This causing things to be missed, quality to suffer, and delays becoming constant.
From these conversations I worked with the team to define a series of journey maps to better define workflows and problem areas.

Objectives established from the research:

Improve usability and accessibility.
Our staff uses admin software during the entire shift and as a result they have mentioned eye fatique given the software's color contrast and lack of dark mode for night staff

Introduce more automation.

There are a lot of inefficiencies that can be solved with software.

Increase productivity

Small ux issues have been pointed out that can improve speed and quality of life for the team.

Increase transparency and communication.

Communication has been broken between departments. Software can help fix that.

Increase tracking

By providing more solutions to track work, we can unlock unknown issues as they happen.

Process

As a manager for the design team I spent a good chunk of my time helping the team deliver the highest quality work while staying ontop of schedules and expectation all while not becoming burn't out.

This was all done through weekly checkins, asana updates and spec documentation improvements/automations.

The first example here is of our design process doc we made our process off of

Here is an example of the spec doc I drafted and revised to make sure clarity was made.

Here is an example of how we managed projects by sprint, milestone and design phase.

I also spent a good amount of time making sure no on e was overloaded and their workloads were evenly balanced.

Design system

Establishing themes

One of the biggest complaints and problems was around accessibility and theming.

Accessibility was a huge issue as we had staff working around the clock and shifts that worked late at night or even just late had severe eye strain with our very white tool. So we introduced a dark mode and bumped up contrast to make things even easier to read.

We also at the same time adjusted some of our color tokens to support more contrast and color blindness as this was a frequent issue in the factory.

Evolving the system

One of the earliest initiatives was establishing a design system that can easily improve speed of development as well as cohesion across products. We started with building out our atoms or foundation library first then moved to improve our components over time.

Here are a few screenshots of some of our components. This including the interactive states for each.

Along with the components themselves, we also generated guidelines and doucmentation for the library. This helping establish shared understanding across the org.

Here are a few examples of our foundation elements such as typography, color and iconography

Here are a few screenshots of how we leveraged storybook to test our components and make sure they were working properly across all 3 sites.

To the right are a few examples of how we brought the rebel brand out through the component interactive states.

Iterating

With a design system in place and themeing introduced. We then moved to tackle some more larger and robust problems across the admin experience.

This included:
1. Improve navigation & usability
2. Improve jobs IA for increased productivity
3. Introduce improved task dialogs that improve quality and consistency during production.

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Outcomes

Over time we were able to ship a massive overhaul to the admin software. Including more automation and easier to user interfaces for the team to quickly execute. This in all bringing production time down more than half the time from when I first joined.

Takeaway & Reflection

Design system

- Established a robust design system that decreased development time and increased cohesion across the software.

- Built a reusable component library that is now integrated to all applications

- Built out documentation and resources to establish more alignment and thoughtful thinking

- Built a culture that thought more systematically in terms of our UI

Productivity

- Overhauled our admin product in order to improve productivity and quality

- Avg 3x increase of print jobs accomplished daily by a operator. Due to improved QA process, automated assignment

- Removed 2hrs daily/10hrs weekly spent on updating spreadsheets by a operator.

- Speed up marketing efforts with a custom CMS buildout for the website.

Explore more

Evernote Collect

Experience Design

Autodesk Design System

Experience Design

Gantri Marketplace

Experience Design

Misc Branding

Branding
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