Project & Resources Management App

In Brief

GE Renewable Energy offers digital services for renewable assets across the globe.

FutureDraft partnered with GE’s digital team to build a cross-functional application to connect wind farms and monitoring systems into a single, modern software solution.

My focus was on ‘Manage’, which handles all task and resources management across the company’s suite of wind power products.

The goal was to minimize turbine reclimbs to increase productivity and therefore reduce cost by about $10 million per year.

Role

Led design and supported the development of ‘Manage’, one of the products of the Digital Wind Farm Ecosystem, focused on task and resources management.

Process

We worked closely with Product Managers, Engineers and End Users to translate the field experience into a digital space. We interviewed wind farm personnel across the globe and collaborated in workshops to find ways to support a wide array of complex workflows into a single application. Out of this process emerged a clear need to give the platform a design system, define patterns and artifacts that can scale as the system matures.

One app for all workflows

Users in different regions had specific workflows; from Smartsheets and MS Projects to whiteboards and heavily relying on personal knowledge of personnel and priorities. Our biggest challenge was to have every workflow supported by one holistic application.‍ To solve for this, we designed a flexible grouping feature that paired with a fluid timeline renders data in various configurations and timeframes.

The result was a more natural and intuitive path for users to adapt their existing workflows and behaviors into Manage, and allowing the system to grow with user feedback and to be tailored and customized as it scales.

Automating processes

One of the goals of Manage was to simplify and make daily work more efficient. To make this happen, we designed for automated routine tasks triggered from every workflow, and together with a companion mobile application for technicians in the field, the system flows data back and forth to connect and trigger actions that streamline daily operations.