Key results:
- ✅ Up to 99% of time saved when creating a support ticket
- ✅ Incident resolution time decreased because of well-defined description of automatically-created issues
Nanoramic Laboratories is an advanced materials company that revolutionized the market of supercapacitors. A combination of proprietary materials and a low-cost manufacturing process allows Nanoramic Laboratories to provide its clients with efficient energy storage solutions. Technologies licensed by Nanoramic Laboratories can be applied in various industries, including electric vehicles, grid energy storage, and consumer electronics.
The main focus of Nanoramic Laboratories is R&D. Because of it, continuous improvement and removal of organizational friction are very important aspects of the company.
The Challenge
Nanoramic Laboratories were looking for a way to further improve some of their offline processes and establish a constant data flow between different departments. The goal was to ensure that a broken TV in a meeting room or out-of-stock raw material won’t block the R&D process. Besides that, small things like missing coffee pods in the kitchen or missing dry-erase markers should never stand in the way of creativity and research.
Teams were already using Jira, but creating tickets required time and effort that could be allocated to more valuable items.
The Solution
The company CEO, Eric Kish, saw an announcement of a new AWS product - AWS 1-Click IoT button. The concept of “just clicking a button to resolve the issue” was very appealing to Nanoramic Laboratories and fulfilled their desire to have a simple way to notify responsible team members about possible issues.
Nanoramic Laboratories approached AgileVision.io as a managed service provider with extensive experience in AWS and IoT-enabled solutions. Previous experience in applying IoT buttons to capture information without a need for a PC/laptop/mobile device ensured a complete understanding of client’s needs.
Nanoramic Laboratories and AgileVision.io worked closely to create a product based on the needs of team members. After a series of meetings with stakeholders and a discovery phase, the first version of the Nanoramic IoT Platform was released.
Agile product development approach with iterations (also known as “sprints”) resulted in the further evolution of the Nanoramic IoT Platform. The platform allowed creating Jira tickets once somebody clicked the button attached to a specific physical location ( near the audio/video equipment or at the particular workstation).
Automatic Scoring, Prioritization and Closing of Support Tickets
It may be challenging to determine what type of organizational friction to resolve first. Nanoramic Laboratories and AgileVision.io concluded that most items that annoy team members should be resolved as quickly as possible.
To ensure a timely resolution, a scoring mechanism was implemented: each time someone clicked an IoT button connected with a particular issue (e.g., missing coffee pods), the system automatically increased the priority of the issue. Once the priority reached the critical level, those issues had to be resolved immediately, since it meant most of the team members faced them.
After the issue was fixed, a responsible person could quickly notify everyone simply by double-clicking the related button.
Remote Printer Control
To better understand each IoT button’s purpose, we needed a way to describe the exact purpose of the button. We utilized label printers present in the factory and allowed to generate and print IoT button labels automatically.
Because the IoT platform was running in the cloud, we needed a way to schedule printing at the related workstation. A special “agent” application was developed and deployed to the same network as a label printer to achieve this.
Each time the user needed to create a label, they would do it directly from the IoT platform.
Results
The system has been functioning for almost two years. Assuming one needs 5-15 minutes to create a support ticket if they are not close to their PC, the IoT Platform saves up to 99% of this time. Before deploying the IoT Platform, some issues took more time to resolve because people could simply forget to create a corresponding support request.
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