February 27, 2023 · 4 min read
AiSight new Machine Insight Center is live. We've developed this important new software based on feedback from maintenance and production experts like you—and we want your continued participation!
We've been hard at work developing new software for the AiSight predictive maintenance solution. And the all-new Machine Insight Center is now in full effect, providing insights, preventing downtime.
We developed the AiSight Machine Insight Center based on feedback from users like you—the production and maintenance professionals who rely on our predictive maintenance solution to prevent unplanned downtime. And we want our users to be a part of the Machine Insight Center's continued development.
This article is an introduction to a series about the Machine Insight Center. This series will serve as an introduction to the Machine Insight Center, but it will also provide insight into the design process behind its development. In upcoming articles, we'll share our design approach: how we've based our design on feedback from maintenance professionals, how we manage that feedback, and how we'll continue to collect feedback. Remember: we want users like you involved! Product development is a continuous process; your involvement now will affect future features in the Machine Insight Center.
Why the new Machine Insight Center?
The old dashboard was great. It served capably for years as the interface through which our users collected and organized detailed analytics on thousands of alerts. It worked, and it worked well.
But we’ve always listened to our users. Our users are serious about eliminating unplanned downtime and know what it takes to pull that off. We heard, again and again, that ending unplanned downtime would be easier with new features, including more flexible organization options, the ability to view machine histories, visualized alerts, and user permissions.
Unfortunately, the dashboard wasn’t capable of integrating some of those new features while remaining the stalwart piece of software maintenance professionals could count on.
Simply put, providing the features users want is the best way to deliver value to our customers. But we also need our software to be fast, secure, and scalable—capable of managing hundreds, even thousands, of sensors for any client. And the dashboard couldn’t do it all—it wasn't future proof. Sooner or later, its limits would limit our ability to provide unlimited machine uptime for our enterprise clients.
Considering our requirements—both our own as developers and our customers’ needs—we faced a tough choice: fix up the dashboard, or rebuild our software from scratch.
You know by now that we chose to start over. But it wasn’t an easy choice.
Fix the AiSight dashboard, or make something new?
Both choices had their advantages. Fixing up the dashboard would mean that we could use the current code and UI framework. Taking this approach, we could adapt the software continuously while simultaneously developing new features.
But fundamental architecture issues in the dashboard would prevent us from making certain changes. Worse, they might require us to make the same changes over and over again. Some of these changes could even amount to leaps of faith, done without evidence that they would eventually contribute to the overall changes we needed.
On the other hand, starting over and rebuilding our software from the ground up would allow us to avoid these issues. We could implement every change and every feature intentionally, with a clear vision of where we were going—all in accordance with industry best practices for security and performance optimization. The rebuilt product would be fundamentally better.
Rebuilding wouldn't be without its drawbacks. For one thing, in order to develop anew for our requirements, we would have to freeze feature development. Given the demand for new features, this was a tough tradeoff to make.
That tradeoff would, however, be a blessing in disguise. By pausing feature development, we gained the opportunity to get features right. This was our chance to spend time working with the maintenance professionals using our solution, on our solution—to systematically collect feedback on what worked, what didn't, and what else we could do to make our solution as powerful and user friendly as possible.
The result would be software that was designed from the ground up for maintenance professionals, by maintenance professionals. Ultimately, that's why we decided that the best way forward was to start over.
The result of that decision—and a whole lot of development since—is the new Machine Insight Center.
Get the new AiSight Machine Insight Center
You can start using the new AiSight Machine Insight Center right now. Existing AiSight users can simply login with credentials from the dashboard—all of your existing data is there, ready for you to start reaping the insights.
If you aren't using AiSight's predictive maintenance solution, why not start? Get a free consultation!
The Machine Insight Center offers the alert information and insights you need and expect from our predictive maintenance solution, plus easy-to-understand analytics on machine faults, alert severity information, inter-sensor graph comparisons, alert resolution functions, dark mode, a faster interface, and a mobile version, with much more to come.
As a user, you not only get the benefit of using this software, you get to participate in designing its future. You'll have the chance to provide feedback directly through the app, with a direct call to your customer success representative, or by scheduling a meeting here. Let us know what you love; let us know what could be better.
Plus, this is your chance to decide which features we implement next. The future of the Machine Insight Center is wide open. We only ask for your participation in making it happen.
In the rest of this series, we’ll share the story of how we developed the Machine Insight Center, what's coming next, and how you can be part of this story.
Next time, we'll look at how we changed our design process, using the opportunity that starting over presented to invite maintenance professionals into our design process. In the following article, we'll get into how we manage feedback and implement our users’ demands. Finally, we'll offer a preview of what's to come. We have big plans for the future of the Machine Insight Center, and we want you to weigh in on what you want next.
Maintenance and production professionals: it's time to design the future of predictive maintenance
In the rest of this series, we’ll share the story of how we developed the Machine Insight Center, what's coming next, and how you can be part of this story.
Next time, we'll look at how we changed our design process, using the opportunity that starting over presented to invite maintenance professionals into our design process. In the following article, we'll get into how we manage feedback and implement our users’ demands. Finally, we'll offer a preview of what's to come. We have big plans for the future of the Machine Insight Center, and we want you to weigh in on what you want next.
