✨ Project: mPIMS App
🏢 Company: FR Group
💼 Role: UX design, Innovation, Problem solver, Team Lead
⌚ Job: Full-time
Overviews
In early 2021, I was asked to lead a project called “mPIMS” as UI/UX designer along with 2 other designers & 1 manager. The client is a company that manages 170,596 hectares of oil palm plantations (23,809 thousand soccer fields 😲) in Riau, West & South Kalimantan. The company manages the plantation, harvesting, and processing into crude palm oil (CPO) for local and export. Honestly, this is one of the biggest projects I've ever worked on, I was a little nervous but very excited.
The Challenges
We conducted intensive interviews for 1 week to gather requirements from the client & related stackholders. They shared the current working conditions & technology used:
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The foreman only uses paper & pen to record all harvest activities, very often there are miscalculations between officers.
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The size of the plantation & the hilly terrain are the biggest challenges.
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Some areas are not covered by cellular signal (completely isolated).
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The transportation of fruits must be done by various types of vehicles to pass through difficult terrain sometimes making the number of fruits counted wrong.
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The company only uses 1 office that has internet access to send daily harvest results to the head office & other branches, while field management is managed manually without technology due to limited access to cellular signal & internet.
FYI to get to the office takes 5 hours from the city of Palang Karaya Riau.
First finding: problem assumptions from worker reports
Based on the workflow of workers' activities, we found several problems that company workers complained about:
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There is often a miscalculation between the foreman and the assistant from the garden harvest.
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The time-consuming process of sorting harvested fruits to be sent to the factory, FYI this sorting process is distinguished between ripe, rotten, deformed & destroyed fruits related to harvesters' wages (sensitive & conflict-prone).
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Inefficient recording of worker attendance 1 by 1.
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The transfer of workers between farms is slow to process because of data checking that must go to the office first, the manager said “sometimes there are often those who suddenly move farms without permission”.
What to solve?
After interviewing everyone involved from foremen, assistants, employee management, operations, etc. we decided there were 3 things that needed to be improved:
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Fruit harvest transportation management & governance
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Worker data management for a more effective attendance system
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Synchronization of data updates between foreman devices
Why?
I think the 3 points above represent the company's workflow issues, starting from the harvest → transport → human error process that often occurs. By improving these, the main issue related to the miss calculation of harvest results between foremen can be resolved while increasing the effectiveness of working time.
Challenge
The terrain that is not touched by cellular signals is the main obstacle to sharing data between devices.
Solutions
1. Area mapping with local GPS to determine device coordinates
How to find out GPS coordinates without cellular signal? You must be thinking of satellites... yes, but satellites still need internet / cellular, at the location there is no such thing. We tried to make a custom map of the garden area & put it into the local device file.
That way the user coordinates can be known even though only 70% accuracy level. But in a large enough garden area narrowing the scanned area makes it very easy to know someone's position.
2. Identify workers, farms, fruit points and even trucks with QR nametags & planks
Seems like a simple solution... right!. By using QR codes in various forms & places can speed up the process of identifying who & where the location of the activity occurs without the need to talk much.
You know... time is money, just scan now they don't need to talk much / even type the location position, Simple but effective.
3. Data sharing between devices with bluetooth & NFC
We can utilize NFC as the identifier of each device + location coordinates to send to other devices. Then large data such as photos, videos or database updates can be compressed much smaller and sent via bluetooth.
Thus users can share data with each other if they meet on the way with mutual tabs of the devices they carry.
Design Phase
...
(Soon)