June 18, 2019

015 - Opportunities and Challenges When Designing IoT Analytics Experiences for the Industrial & Manufacturing Industries with CEO Bill Bither

Bill Bither, CEO and Co-Founder of MachineMetrics, is a serial software entrepreneur and a manufacturing technology leader. He founded and bootstrapped Atalasoft to image-enable web applications which led to a successful exit in 2011 to Kofax. In 2014, he co-founded MachineMetrics to bring visibility and predictability to the manufacturing floor with an Industrial IoT analytics platform that collects data from machines. This data is used to benchmark performance, drive efficiency, improve equipment uptime, and enable automation. Today, join us as we discuss the various opportunities and challenges in the complex world of industrial IoT and manufacturing. Bill and I discuss the importance of visualizations and its relationship to improving efficiency in manufacturing, how talking to machine operators help add context to analytics data and even inform UI/UX decisions, as well as how MachineMetrics goes about making the telemetry from these machines useful to the operators. We also covered:

How improving a customer’s visibility into CNC machines helped reveal accurate utilization rates and improved efficiency

How simple visualizations make a tangible difference in operational performance

Bill’s model for the 4 different phases of analytics

Descriptive

Diagnostic

Predictive

Prescriptive

Mistakes Bill learned early on about product dev in the IIoT analytics space

What Bill learned from talking to customers that ended up identifying a major design flaw his team wasn’t aware of

The value you can glean from talking to customers

MachineWorks’ challenges with finding their market fit and aligning their product around customer’s needs

How MachineMetrics has learned to simplify the customer’s analytics experience

Resources and Links

Bill Bither on LinkedIn MachineMetrics

Quotes from Today’s Episode

“We have so much data, but the piece that really adds enormous value is human feedback.” — Bill "Simplicity is really hard. It takes time because it requires empathy and it requires going in and really getting into the head or the life of the person that's gonna use your tool. You have to understand what's it like being on a shop floor running eight different CNC machines. If you've never talked to someone, it's really hard to empathize with them." — Brian “In all the work that we do, in adding more intelligence to the product, it's just making the experience simpler and simpler.” — Bill “You don't have to go in and do great research; you can go in and just start doing research and learn on the way. It's like going to the gym. They always tell you, ‘It doesn't matter what exercise you do, just go and start.’ ...then you can always get better at making your workout optimal.” — Brian “It's really valuable to have routine visits with customers, because you just don't know what else might be going on.” — Brian “The real value of the research is asking ‘why’ and ‘how,’ and getting to the root problem. That's the insight you want. Customers may have some good design ideas, but most customers aren't designers. ... Our job is to give people what they need.” — Brian

Transcript

Brian: On my chat today, with Bill Bither, the CEO of MachineMetrics, we talked about UX in the world of industrial IoT. MachineMetrics has a great platform for monitoring the run rate, cycle times and status of large

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