Production Targets

Company

B2W Software improvement that impacted both B2W Schedule and B2W Track

B2W Schedule is used by construction companies to streamline the scheduling process. Employees from various departments can schedule their resources while having visibility to the activities of the departments they work with. This increases collaboration and gives the company greater agility with their work.

B2W Track is a field tracking solution for construction companies where they can track production on their jobs along with employee & equipment hours, materials delivered and used, and more. This data allows companies to make informed decisions to keep their jobs running on time and under budget.

Project Date

2017-2018

My Role

I worked as the Lead User Experience Designer on this project alongside the Track Product Manager, Schedule Product Manager, a Business Analyst, and a Development Lead. I was responsible for customer research, wireframes, prototypes, and defining the styling for implementation.

The Problem

Site supervisors and project managers need a way to plan and schedule their production work and communicate the plan to the foreman and other field employees. As the schedule can change every day, they need an easy way to adjust these goals and ensure their work is done on time and under budget.

Project Summary

As we talked to customers about scheduling their jobs, many talked about the challenge of planning their production work. They often set a general plan over a number of days, then as work went on and delays happened, they adjusted the schedule. The production target (goal) feature was set to handle this workflow. It impacted B2W Schedule where the schedule is set over a number of days, the Jobs area shared across products showing progress on the job and B2W Track where the foreman see their target for the day and record progress in their Field Log. The primary user for this feature is a job supervisor or project manager who will set daily production goals across their active jobs.

The Challenge

The biggest challenge in this feature was to identify a way to calculate the targets by man hour, production hour, and day. As we started this feature, we didn’t calculate the number of people in a crew to know man hour. We also found the size of crew often would change which impacted this calculation.

Requirements

  • Targets can be created for job production accounts. The user needs to be able to create a target over a number of days that may not be sequential.
  • Targets can be assigned to any crew/crew template.
  • Targets should be available on the Job. The job supervisor needs the ability to compare the actual production and targeted production. This information will be used to make adjustments to the targets.
  • Targets need to be adjusted as previous days are completed ahead or behind schedule.
  • Targets need to be moved to future days when there are delays like rain.
  • Today’s target needs to be visible on the Field Log desktop and tablet applications.
  • A target should contain the crew or crew type need, quantity to be produced, crew size and duration/hours worked.

The Solution

We began work on this feature with the scheduling dialog on the schedule and visibility on the jobs area.

This was an early concept for the scheduling dialog. It allowed scheduling for non sequential dates but did not give visibility to previous work and if the work is ahead or behind the target. We talked to customers and tried some new concepts.

Our early concept for setting production targets in the jobs area shows the progress in each account and the targets for a selected week. As we discussed this further, we found that this offered more account information than the users needed making the view difficult to use.

We spent time with customers and iterated on our concepts. The final views involved with production targets are below.

Targets on the Schedule

This view shows the production targets on a view with crew assignments. The targets are shown in the green bubbles. Each bubble shows the job, production quantity and production account. This view is helpful because each day the supervisor can see who is assigned to work and what they are expected to accomplish. This particular screenshot also shows how needs can be filled with a crew of that type. To do this, they drag the need (white bubble with colored border) vertically and drop it on the available crew.

Some people will view the targets and other scheduled items from their tablet app.

Production targets can be viewed in context of everything happening on the job
This wireframe shows the dialog used to create production targets.
This is a screenshot of setting up a production target in the system.

Below are a few key elements to the dialog above

  • The chart demonstrates the progress of production work. Green was completed in the past, purple is currently scheduled, blue has not yet been scheduled. The dark blue line represents the total amount targeted, here showing that the crew is working ahead of what was targeted.
  • The user can click on the calendar on the right to select which days they want to target. These do not need to be sequential.
  • In the lower right, you see the calculations used to determine the amount that will be produced. Based on context, a number of these items are prefilled. For example, when you select a crew, the crew size is prefilled with the number of people in the crew. Of course the person planning this project can add additional crew members to the assignment and here to the target to complete the job on time.
This chart shows common scenarios of the production graph.
The view above shows all of the current targets that are set for an account. On this view, a user can delete existing targets, update or reassign targets or redistribute quantities over a number of days.
This view is a screenshot of the completed page.
This chart demonstrates different fields that are shown for distribute, update and delete. The update feature is an interesting application because it will let you take a quantity of work and spread it over the number of days you select. Many people will use this to catch up on work that is behind schedule.

Targets in the Jobs

  • In the jobs area, we created a few new sections in the account page. This allowed the user to easily see what was estimated, the work reported/completed, and the remaining work.
  • Past production targets can be viewed in the reported area and the user can compare targeted quantity to the field log quantity.
  • The future production targets live in the remaining area. There is a table showing the targets by day and a link to create additional targets.
  • We added a graph to compare the actual quantity with the target quantity. You can also compare these numbers with the estimated rate and the average of work completed. Estimators will also review this data so their future estimates are more accurate to what the crew can produce.

This is a screenshot of the completed graph.
This is a screenshot of the tables for reviewing production details of past work and the work you have remaining.

Targets in B2W Track

The two images below show the production account area of a Field Log (daily log of work). Here you see the target quantity, reported quantity and variance of how far ahead or behind they are.

Benefits

After releasing this feature, we held user testing sessions for creating and editing production targets. People were able to use the functionality without major issues. The primary feedback we’ve received is around managing multiple targets on a single job, primarily on large jobs. This includes moving them out a number of days. We will solve this in a future feature.