Oper8

Our project originated from the Plant Operations team at Algonquin College. Operators are responsible for the supervision and maintenance of heavy equipment that provide heating, cooling, water, and power to the College. This critical infrastructure is carefully monitored by operators through consistent daily inspections. During these inspections, plant operators track hundreds of data points across dozens of pieces of equipment sprawled across the campus.

Currently, plant operators use either paper and pencil or lug around a heavy laptop to log the results of these routine inspections. In addition to the mandatory daily checks of physical equipment, Plant Operators have many other responsibilities including the completion of maintenance requests and fire safety checks, as well as managing contractors.

By conducting user research, our team identified that the traditional logging process offered several areas of improvement that would help boost operators productivity on-the-job. The team decided that developing a mobile software solution would help plant operators become more efficient and eliminate the physical demands of carrying a laptop around heavy machinery and tight spaces. Through our research, the team also unearthed several important technical constraints, like the necessity for the application to function offline due to spotty Wi-Fi connections in certain areas of the College.

During our initial research our team quickly came to the realization that the work of plant operators is not easy to understand, so we decided it would be valuable for us to gain a deeper understanding of the logging process that we were aiming to improve. Donning hard hats, steel-toed boots and eye protection, several team members conducted an observation session by shadowing a plant operator completing their daily log. Over 10,000 steps later, across multiple buildings on campus, we emerged with a clearer understanding of the pain points the plant operations team faces on-the-job. Most notably, we discovered a large portion of the tracked data points are located on Human-Machine Interface (HMI) screens.

After analyzing our extensive user research results, we concluded the plant operators needed a solution that was mobile, offline-ready, and would run on their work-provided iPhones. As such, our team decided that the best solution for our client would be a native iOS application. Creating a native application enabled us to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology from Apple to dramatically improve plant operators’ efficiency on-the-job. This image-to-text scanning technology allows operators to simply take a picture of an HMI screen to extract all of the relevant readings from that particular screen and populate the log.

Oper8 is a custom-tailored iOS application that reduces the time spent logging hundreds of data points during operators’ daily inspections. After completing their rounds, the plant operator can generate a spreadsheet to share with their supervisor. The application works seamlessly both offline and online, and safely saves log data so that anyone on the team can continue progress on the log where another operator left off.