HP Inc.'s Digital Manufacturing Platform

As HP pivots its concentration in the additive manufacturing space (à la 3D printing) away from hardware & material sales as their KPIs, the need for digital process tools grew.
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The first vertical application is Molded Fiber Toolingthese are toolsets to make fiber packaging in a factory.
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The initial priorities of the Order Management Tool design effort were:
- Understanding the existing business processes
- Consolidate the number of tools used by the application team
- Track the team's steps to reduce work on future customer orders

Stakeholder interviews were conducted to gather specific requirements for each phase of the business covering all sections from awareness through delivery.

This was followed up with a sequence of design lead workshops for the application team (platform users) to better understand how they were approaching tasks manually. These workshops enabled us to identify the personas using the platform.

‍Key Insights:
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1.
‍Most value for additive manufacturing is when products are custom to the end user (SKU of one unit), however an individual custom product carries the same administrative & engineering overhead as one conventional product sold to 10,000 people (SKU of 10,000 units).

2.
The application team was using every off-the-shelf software under the sun to "stay organized"
Smartsheet, Excel, Word, Onenote, Onedrive, Project, Teams, Zoom, Slack, G-Drive, G-Sheets, G-Docs (don't worry there were several more)

How do we converge and simplify their software tool stack?

The outcomes of the stakeholder interviews, the initial workshop with the application team, & the follow up interviews to clarify specific topics were:
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- High level workflow
- Swim-lane workflows
- A journey map
- Personas

It was difficult for the application team to split out their process into distinct milestones.
Design was able to pull apart the complicated end-to-end into main sections:

- Order Intake (Customer & HP Sales)
- Order Management
- Product Development (Digital CAD pre-production processes)
- Factory & Production Management

We did a cadenced series of 1:1 user tests with the persona representatives, giving us comprehensive qualitative and quantitative feedback. This early & often information gathering method helped to stack rank the platform into its core elements by greatest user need. This information was then brought to the Business & Development teams helping concentrate high value work first.

Core Elements of the Order Management Tool:
- Order / Project Management
- File Management
- Development Team Task Management
- Factory Handoff

Also to note 50% of our team partners are located in Barcelona Spain & due to travel restrictions, all work has been remotely. We leveraged the collaborative tools Figma, Miro, Zoom, Slack, & Google Drive to keep both timezones up to speed.

A key part of my role as the lead on the program was keeping alignment with our partners outside Design. I worked together with the Product Manager & the Software Architect to adjust the platform trajectory based on the research findings.

I also represented Design in the Product Marketing meetings & requirements setting as well as in the Development Program Increment planning sessions. This ensured a tight sync between the three organizations & gave the business confidence our live product would be successful.

Key screens of the Order Management Tool:
- Dashboard & Analytics
- Orders Home
- Orders Detail

At HP Inc. we have clear and defined Development Handoffs making certain the user & customer needs go live.

Since launching the Digital Manufacturing Platform, we were able to reduce the new business launch time from months to weeks.
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We also increased daily work activity throughput by a fact of x5 for Molded Fiber Toolset development by utilizing the platform instead of the previous manual processes.

Since launching Molded Fiber Tooling HP Inc. has announced their commitment to reducing their to sustainability with their: Sustainable Bond Framework