Designing Enterprise & Service Experiences in a Complex Operational Ecosystem

Context & Business Problem

Tata Marcopolo operates a large-scale bus manufacturing operation spread across 17 sequential plants, where work flows linearly from Plant 1 through Plant 17. Each plant depends on the output of the previous one to continue production.

The core challenge was lack of visibility and coordination across plants. When a delay occurred in one plant, downstream plants had no real-time awareness of the issue. This resulted in idle time in some plants, sudden workload spikes in others, and an overall inability to plan production effectively.

The business needed a solution that would bring real-time operational transparency, improve planning, reduce idle time, and motivate plant-floor teams — without disrupting existing manufacturing processes.

My Role & Responsibility

I led the UX and service design strategy for this initiative.

My responsibility included:
• Understanding the end-to-end manufacturing workflow across all plants
• Framing the operational problem from a system perspective
• Designing an information model that worked for non-technical, plant-floor users
• Defining what information needed to be surfaced, where, and in what form
• Translating operational needs into a clear, usable, real-time digital experience

I worked closely with operations and leadership teams to align the solution with production realities and adoption constraints across all plants. This was not a visual redesign problem - it was a workflow, coordination, and behavior-change problem.

Problem Framing & Research

I began by mapping the entire production flow across all 17 plants, identifying:

• Dependencies between plants
• Common causes of delays
• Points where lack of information caused inefficiencies
• The type of information each plant actually needed to operate better

A key insight was that planning was failing not because of poor intent, but because of poor visibility. Teams were reacting late to issues simply because they didn’t know what was happening upstream.

Key Insights

• Downstream plants were often idle because they were unaware of upstream delays
• At other times, plants were suddenly overloaded due to unanticipated backlog
• Supervisors lacked a shared, real-time view of production status
• Quality control issues were recurring because known errors were not visible at the right stage
• Employee motivation was low due to lack of recognition and transparency

This pointed to the need for a shared operational awareness system, not individual dashboards.

Design Strategy

I proposed a distributed digital display system, installed at each plant, designed specifically for the manufacturing floor.

The system displayed:
• The number of buses currently at each plant
• The stage of completion for each vehicle
• Real-time progress and delays across all 17 plants
• Common errors to avoid, specific to that plant
• Relevant quality control (QC) issues applicable at that stage

This allowed every plant to anticipate workload, adjust staffing, and prepare proactively instead of reacting late.

System & Workflow Design

The design focused on clarity, glanceability, and shared understanding:

• Information was structured to be understood within seconds
• No complex interactions - the display was always “on” and always current
• Data hierarchy prioritized what affected the next decision on the floor
• The same system language was used across all plants to avoid interpretation errors

The goal was not just visibility, but coordination at scale.

Motivation & Behavioral Design

Beyond operational data, I introduced motivational and behavioral elements:

• “Employee of the Quarter” recognition based on transparent point systems
• A leaderboard visible to all, creating healthy competition
• Clear linkage between performance, quality, and recognition

This was intentionally designed to build ownership and accountability, not just efficiency.

Constraints & Trade-offs

• The system had to work within existing manufacturing operations
• It had to be usable by non-technical users
• It needed to communicate complex information in a simple, visual way
• Any solution that required heavy interaction or training was ruled out

The digital display model was chosen specifically because it minimized friction while maximizing impact.

Outcome & Impact

• Improved visibility across all plants
• Reduced idle time caused by unanticipated delays
• Better production planning due to shared awareness
• Increased accountability and motivation on the plant floor
• Quality issues were addressed earlier by surfacing known errors at the right stage
• This materially improved production predictability across plants.

The solution shifted the organization from reactive firefighting to proactive coordination.

Why This Work Matters

This project demonstrates my ability to:
• Solve enterprise-scale, operational problems
• Design systems for complex, non-digital environments
• Apply service design thinking beyond screens
• Balance usability, operational reality, and organizational behavior
• Create UX solutions that influence how teams work — not just what they see

This is the kind of work required in large, complex organizations where design must integrate deeply with operations.