Our software wouldn't be as good if our developers didn't meet people who work in the factory and use it. Factory operations still rely heavily on paper. It's

Our software wouldn't be as good if our developers didn't meet people who work in the factory and use it. Factory operations still rely heavily on paper. It's reliable, the infrastructure to support it is reliable, and people are willing to deal with inefficiency for reliability. A maintenance manager on the floor doesn't want to be dealing with a crashing app or network connectivity issues while they're filling out a part requisition form or maintenance report. And an operator doesn't want to hit save in the app and see a bunch of red boxes when they have a spill to attend to. However the inefficiency of paper leads to inaccurate results, slow lead times, and altogether missed opportunities. People invariably copy yesterdays form into the new one and get on with their day. Digging up all that paper work and manually entering the data into a spreadsheet can result in more errors in the data. And doing any kind of large-scale analysis on components with maintenance reports involving those components is time consuming and laborious... and doing it across an entire conglomerate is basically impossible this way. We have to make affordances to our interface that take the operating environment and the people interacting with it into account. Reliability is really important. Software isn't the solution to everything. Always have a plan B.