About the client
Eurotherm is a division of Schneider Electric and is a leading global supplier of Industrial Automation and process control tools.
Challenge
Eurotherm has been operating a compliance platform for a number of years. Our solution allows their clients to have full transparency on the compliance status of their assets. This is crucial for manufacturing infrastructure operating in regulated industries such as aerospace, automotive, chemicals, food and drink, and pharmaceutical sectors.
Their previous platform did not meet the needs of large manufacturers with complex compliance and calibration requirements. In particular, Eurotherm’s clients demanded realtime visibility of their operations and insights into the status of their production infrastructure.
Key achievements
- Global dashboards to empower real-time production decisions
- Rebuilt and relaunched cloud-based platform creating exponential growth
- Achieved product market fit in premium regulated manufacturing industry
Solution
Hack and Craft redesigned and built the new platform from the ground up. The reimagined product focused on creating a collaborative hub for the compliance and calibration industry.
Real-Time Dashboard Analytics
H&C introduced modern analytics tools that produced a much richer context to asset status. The new dashboard analytics enables ‘rolled up’ compliance status from Plant Area level to Country. This information is vital for manufacturers as it now enables them to optimise their operations using highly informative real-time data.
Improved Customer Connectivity
H&C transformed the one dimensional Service Provider based system into a multi role collaborative hub. This enables seamless collaboration between many organisations all concerned with the operational efficiency. This model is disrupting the compliance sector as each organisation in the platform encourages their existing partners to join the eMCA ecosystem.
Industry leading security
H&C delivered the platform using secure agile methodology. Our approach combines the highest standards of security with an iterative methodology. The relaunched product introduced a lighter, more secure framework which reduced known system vulnerabilities by 95%.
Robust asset monitoring
H&C delivered mobile monitoring technology which empowers engineers to maintain asset status. This enabled coordination of maintenance with detailed real time data on production assets.
How we did it
We began the project with a Strategy phase which engaged a team of core stakeholders and identified barriers to growth.
In collaboration with our engineers and designers this team executed a multi stream Design phase. This delivered detailed value stream maps, product specifications, security assessments, and a project plan for iterative delivery of the reimagined platform.
During the Design phase we also engaged with technical stakeholders to define integration paths for the many complex legacy systems. As this is a tightly regulated industry, it was also essential to align release and deployment processes with existing production policies.
Following the Design phase we began our iterative Development phase. This delivered the specification defined during the Design phase in a series of feedback driven iterations.
Our Roll out and Continuous Delivery service provides our client with powerful and sustainable innovation. In partnership with Eurotherm we launched the platform and continue to provide technical support and product management for the production system.
This creates a strong foundation for future innovation and ability for Eurotherm to leverage the platform to capitalise on new market opportunities.
Tech
We built the system on elastically scaling cloud architecture. This gives the platform built in disaster recovery, and very fast user experience. Taking a cloud-native approach also enabled us to implement an agile dev ops process which delivers a rapid response to customer issues.
The system is designed from the ground up to anticipate future requirements. All business logic is contained in decoupled microservices which can be accessed via restful apis. This enables Eurotherm to pursue integrations with their partners and other companies in the eco system.
H&C are uniquely equipped to work within regulated industries like industrial compliance and calibration. Our approach to agile development treats security as an essential system feature, rather than an afterthought to be added retrospectively. We use practises inspired by Secure Development Lifecycle and threat modelling techniques. This ensures every development sprint includes security considerations in the planning stages.
Impact
The relaunched platform has enabled a threefold increase in the onboarding speed of new customers.
The real time dashboard has opened up new market segments in which management analytics are needed to drive strategic optimisation.
Within 6 months of launch Eurotherm were able to onboard over 100k more assets from their customers.