Automotive Test Facility Optimization
Akash Bisht
Cost Optimization
My Role
Requirement Gathering
Journey Mapping
Driving Hypothesis
Wireframing
Visual Design
Team
Product Designer
Product Manager
Engineers
Timeline
3.5 weeks
Background
AVL wanted to develop a Building Management Systems in response to the evolving challenges faced by the Automotive Industry in Test Facilities. With a heavy investment in opening a test facility from investors, AVL wanted to ensure effective and proven ROI. They are seeking to optimize various aspects of the test facility's operations.
Well, What's a test facility?
Also known as production test facilities, use a variety of equipment to verify that a product has been manufactured correctly.
Problem Breakdown
So What is the core problem and expected outcome?
The Company wants to improve test facility efficiency by answering one of their core business problem.
How am I Utilizing and Optimizing the Performance of my Test Facility?
How do we know it's a problem?
We discovered through the stakeholder discussion and other teams that...
Seeking ROI - Businesses are looking forward to effective Utilization and high ROI from Test Facility.
Expense Problem - There is too much of Expense in Building a Test Facility Center. They want to recover their investment asap.
The head of test facility says "If my utilization is 30%, How might I Increase the utilization Instead of opening a new test facility center".
Users should be able to easily understand and interact with the systems.
So the problem was clear, they needed a system which can tell them whether or not they needed to invest in a new facility center, knowing this was crucial because if opening a new facility center is not required, then that would help them save BIG CHUNK of MONEY !
Understanding the Backprocess!
So, I delve deep into the understanding the various activities performed in the test facility center, and one of the important thing to understand was "How is the data being transmitted in a Facility ?" and to understand how the activity was performed.
Identifying Failure Points
After having a fair understand how the system worked, I needed to understand for any given equipment in a testing facility center,
What stages does it goes through?
What are the activities does it perform under each stage?
And what causes the equipment to slow down?
I mapped all the activities and failure points after having brainstorming about the system.
This brings us to an Identification of our Key Goal!
Turns out to enable user to make certain decisions for their Expense Problem mentioned above, we needed to build that help them make their analysis better.
In the current scenario, we also learnt that users are currently performing manual data entry, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and requires high manual toil.
This leads us to a formation of our key goal!
Help user minimize the Non Value Add Activity so that there is efficient utilization of the resources.
Key User Goal
User Xperience Metric
Efficiency and Accurate Analysis.
Our KPI
Facility Utilization %. Value/Non Value Added Activity.
Driving my hypothesis..
After understanding core user problems and determining the key metrics that was discussed with PM’s, I documented my hypothesis as User stories, concisely to test it later. This helped me to receive design critiques and conducting feedback sessions.
Ideation…
I started fleshing out ideas to help build a tool for employee.
I framed my design problem in terms of HMW statement that spurred my ideation. After Ideation, I’ve reached to a point where I iterated over and over again through critique and feedback session from designers and stakeholders.
Final Solution
After numerous discussions and feedbacks with the design team and discussion with stakeholders. I finalized three versions of the monitoring dashboard. Here, we were at the stage where we needed to test these screens with our users. Considering the time constraint and limited resource, we decided to go ahead to do with the cognitive walkthrough. Next we will see which version was finalized and what problems were solved.
Users seemed to have shorter attention span, so they wanted to quickly surface the value. So here encouraging discoverability to quickly visualize critical stages of their equipment that there are in.
We increased the overall real estate for the utilization analysis for faster response to their key metric in real time. This helped users to be more agile so that they can manage risks and maintain stability.
The value activity analysis, helps user to detect performance patterns among the days throughout the week for each working equipment. This helped the user to identify the problems in a larger scale. So user can effectively see data for each month.
Outcomes Achieved
Real time Utilization Visibility -
The user achieved real time visibility into their utilization rate of NVA and VA activities. This resulted in 20% improved in decision making.
Streamlined capital management -
The current assets in the testing facility were improved and were managed more efficiently.
Better planning for next operations -
With the help of insight analysis, user were able to reduce their planning stakes and optimize their future planning. This helped in making a decision whether they need to expand their test facility operations or not.
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Posted Jun 18, 2026
Developed a Building Management System to optimize operations in automotive test facilities.
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