| I'm a partner in a factory and I believe this is an incredibly important area, and the requirements are fairly different than normal "just put it on Confluence" workplaces, in a way that most tech people don't understand and usually completely miss the mark when they're doing product dev. - Your team is out on the floor. Their hands have grease on them. Using tablets sounds great until you're trying to use it with a glove on it, or your hands are dirty, and it's hard to get grease off tablets. But they need the info out on the floor. Also, it can be noisy on the floor. - The team tends to be very visual. They don't like tapping on computers a lot. Literacy ranges from pretty good to kinda OK. Sometimes they refuse to get (or wear) reading glasses for whatever personal reason. - They're working on proprietary hardware, but technicians with the right knowledge are not nearby to come in and look at it. You really need to be able to see the issues visually. Sometimes even hear them. AR might be interesting here. (I spend $10k to fly a tech out for a few days to look at a machine. The bigger issue is that I lose $10k a day from one machine being down, and a tech might not be available to fly out for a week.) - Predictive maintenance. The fancy sensors and whatnot mostly don't work. Tech people try it in a clean, quiet office and it works, and they can raise money on it from clueless VCs, so money keeps getting set on fire with smart AI machine learning magic motor sensor companies. - Preventative maintenance. How to schedule, how to verify it was done, how to check whether it revealed an issue that needs a follow-up. Getting people to do it, and verify it was done, can be a challenge, but there are huge returns to preventative maintenance (for example: checking gearbox oil levels, verifying lubrication line function, checking valve temperatures.) - Diagnosing machine problems. Using prior problem documentation helps team members see most likely issues. But many of these people don't really want to sort through a database of prior similar issues because they "know" what the problem is. How do you provide this information to them in a way that feels more approachable to them? I could go on forever. Manufacturing is an interesting environment because downtime is usually hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars of hard cost per hour, depending on the operation, and they will spend quite a bit of money to stop it from going down, but culturally there's a vast gulf between the white collar SF tech bros and what actually happens in manufacturing plants, so innovation tends to be more limited. |
HOAs, which we serve, are run by busy volunteers, yet expected to perform almost insane financial gymnastics, planning 30 years of major component replacement, e.g. common area roofs, piping, asphalt resurfacing. This involves (a) estimating each component's lifetime (total and remaining), (b) getting a cost estimate, and (c) coming up with a plan to spread paying for it out over however many years before it's needed, breaking that up between the units in the HOA, and collecting the funds, month after month.
People blame cultural issues ("people won't pay for maintenance") or "laziness" but the truth is, it's just too damn hard to do predictive/preventative without a very accurate inventory of what you have. You need to get all of this into a cloud environment, and then somehow expose it so that either internal staff or external vendors (more common) can see exactly what you have, bid on fixing it, and track status and work in a fine-grained way.
Our ultimate goal is doing the entire inventory automatically using computer vision (partner and I used to work in self-driving) and having enough data around that we can price and estimate everything accurately.
Nobody wants to pay for this as a standalone product so we just decided to build a payment collection product (for monthly dues), start with that, and build it up. It's going pretty well and we'd love to get more people on it. Email's in my profile in case you want to chat