The real business impact of design, and how to get 20% more leads

What is the ROI of investing in design?

To make a long story short:

Flottweg - a company from Germany understood the value of intuitive machine operation and invested in a completely new human machine interface concept for its machines. The result: 20% more requests at trade fairs and a design price for the new solution.

Here is how they achieved this:

1. The Motivation

Design expertise and user feedback enable real added value.

The new interface was developed with a professional design office, which advised Flottweg intensively on the makeover and jointly developed a style guide for the implementation of the user interface. “We started with a visualization that was originally developed by users for users, but not sufficiently clear and intuitive. We wanted to offer our customers more, so we decided to work with N+P,” explains Bernhard Niedermeier, development engineer in automation technology at Flottweg.

 “Our company motto is ‘Engineered for your success,’ and this includes giving our customers not just a machine but a solution for their task. Because our products are part of a process, they need to integrate and work together with other systems – and this is also reflected in the visualization solution.”

2. The Implementation

The new visualization, which Flottweg implemented in SIMATIC WinCC Professional, impresses with its high-contrast, clearly structured design and easy interaction. Flottweg also benefits from a well-structured, standardized solution for the automation and visualization of the machines that is easy for users to operate and easy for Flottweg to configure and maintain.

“Of course, we had one or two challenges to resolve,” recalls Gerhard Hager. “Among other things, we had to create the pop-up windows without the usual framework, and we wanted to anchor all attributes to the blocks. Both the Industrial Panel PCs and the controller covers are procured from Siemens as customized versions in the Flottweg corporate design. In addition, Flottweg has implemented the visualization on the SIMATIC HMI Basic Panels with the same design and reduced functionality.

3. The Payoff

The new design has been in use in customer projects since early 2018 and the feedback is consistently positive. The global rollout of the visualization is in the pipeline, and the tailwind provided by the German Design Award will be a significant help, says Michael Hacker, head of automation technology at Flottweg. “The award and the new design were a real eye-catcher when presented at Drinktec,” he confirms. While the new visualization is currently implemented as a machine-based solution on the SIMATIC Panel PC, Flottweg is considering using the new concept also at the SCADA level.

"We had over 20% more requests than usual at this trade fair, and that was certainly due to our new design." - Michael Hacker

4. Full story

The full story can be found here.

https://sie.ag/2VO57nS