Optimised troubleshooting
process on heat exchangers

Alfa Laval is the leading provider of products in the fields of heat transfer, separation, and fluid handling. In this project, I was responsible for designing an application where a technician can take a thermal picture of the heat exchanger, which would then show if the heat exchanger needs repair (or when).

industry

Heavy machinery industry

year

2021

TOOLS & METHODS

Workshop facilitation, user flows,  
UI redesign

WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO SOLVE?

Customers often face a problem where the heat exchangers start to develop faults due to improper maintenance. This leads to high costs, and companies hire lower-cost third-party technicians for repairs.
Alfa Laval wanted to offer a service to lower their customers' costs by troubleshooting heat exchangers at the first signs of malfunction and to prevent malfunctions themselves by sending notifications about upcoming maintenance schedules from their in-house technicians.
Facilitating a discovery workshop

After discussions with stakeholders, we began the project by preparing a discovery workshop. I used the method of empathy mapping alongside the steps of how the application for scanning the heat exchanger looked like in this initial stage.

The goal for this workshop was:
• Getting aligned with stakeholders regarding the needs for the app
• Checking if we are solving the right problem
• Seeing how can we integrate third party app into our flow.

The image below represents the outcome of the work. I started the workshop by explaining the process and then we had an open discussion, while I took notes of participants' ideas.

Heat exchangers need to be regularly maintained

The major outcome of the workshop were the following:
• We can integrate this service into the existing Alfa Laval page (which is a PWA app)
• Identifying serial numbers of older heat exchangers that might not be in the central database anymore (15 years+) will be a challenge
• There is a need for elegant guidance for technicians on how to use a thermal camera on their phones
• Customer support should be a strong fallback solution
• Notifications in the profile about upcoming maintenance schedules

OUR GOAL

To create a PWA application flow that would guide the service technician to take a picture with the thermal camera (third-party app with which Alfa Laval is collaborating) and with the help of AI would create a report. This report would help the customer to lower costs by preventing complete malfunctioning, and Alfa Laval would be able to sell this service along with the service of their service technicians.
User flow for unifying application
and customer support

Now that we had a clear vision of how our product should look like, I designed a user flow from entering into the Alfa Laval page all the way to generating a report and contacting customer support.

In the latter stage, we introduced a "traffic light approach" scenario with three options: that the heat exchanger works properly, that it might need help soon, and that it is completely malfunctioning.

User testing showed that we are on the right track

The client provided us with their five employees from customer support who had time to participate in user testing of the newly created flow.

Findings:
Notifications of maintenance schedules would be very beneficial for customers
• The overall flow was good
• We need to guide the technicians even more on how to use a thermal camera. What to do if the thermal camera is not working?
• Guidance on how to take a photo with thermal camera - should technicians be redirected to the camera app or should they first take the picture and later upload it?

Thanks to customer support people we created another iteration

Customer or a service technician can now enter the serial number directly into the PWA application.

A list of purchased products along with maintenance reminders

On the products page, the customer would receive notifications of already completed checkups or would be prompted to schedule one if necessary. There is also a fallback solution in case the system does not find the serial number in the database.

Clear flow of unit verification and report generation

A simplified flow of unit verification, where the customer needs to answer a few questions and upload images taken by the thermal camera.

The project was then taken over by Alfa Laval's internal engineering team, who continued to develop this solution with the help of Microsoft consultants.

See more work below