Client | Seges
Task Manager is a tool designed to improve the daily efficiency of the farm. It combines information about the required tasks and the machines, which are essential to every activity on the farm. Task Manager provides an overview of how your machines are connected to your daily tasks.
Challenge
SEGES has challenged us to make a virtual machine house - to propose a concept for a digital interface that makes activities around the machine house smarter.
Precision Agriculture
The future of farming will increasingly be characterised by precision agriculture, technology, and the use of data. To prepare for this development, it is important to include information about machines, tasks, and time in the data mix. Combining this data will help farmers to optimise their work.
Process
Point of departure was creating an ecosystem (Rowland et al., 2015) of the farm. Mapping the ecosystem has triggered our team to brainstorm and generate new ideas. While progressing with this exercise, we started hypothesizing about what would happen if we removed certain actors, move them around, or change their relationships.
During our research, we struggled with direct access to the end user - farmer. To get ourselves closer to the situations occurring at the farm, and find answers to the questions formulated during working with the ecosystem we turned to machine dealers, agricultural student - who have worked at the farm themselves, and insurance company.
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Insights
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2 harvesting machines burn every day
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Many fires occur while machines are parked and off” (7 out of 10 fall fires occur in the afternoon, many within one hour after parked)
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Cleaning and maintenance have a major impact in reducing the risk of fire
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The older the vehicle, the less the car owner and farmer care about taking care of it
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When farmers book a service mechanic, they do it by phone
Throughout the research, we’ve talked to different types of actors and stakeholders. This data we’ve used to further zoom in on the ecosystem that we made at the beginning of the project. This gave us a better understanding of the domain of farming, and it was essential in the build of our concept.
Task Manager
Mobile Application
The farmer or farm manager can make a daily plan and divide tasks based on a list of tasks set for the week.
Urgent information about machine availability and weather can be used to make more efficient schedules.
The farmer also has access to complete lists of machines, employees, tasks and the calendar.
Each morning starts with a daily meeting
in the machinery house. When employees
arrive beacon automatically registers them.
After logging in to the system, the employee can
see an overview of today’s tasks.
If the task takes longer than one day or it’s
unfinished from the day before it will be
shown at the top of the list.
After a task is finished, the employee can
swipe left to mark it as done.
Each task is connected with a machine, and
the employee is required to take care of the
machine he used. If the machine is no longer
needed for the day, a popup window with
required maintenance tasks will be shown.
The employee can mark which maintenance tasks are done and add extra tasks that they have done or leave a comment for tasks which needs to be done soon.
If something wrong happens with the machine, an employee can easily report a problem by pressing the “tool/service” icon next to a task.
Alternatively - an employee can choose the
service icon from the main menu and search for the machine.
Then there is an option to order machines by: Name, Year, Status or Location. Or click search icon and type the name manually.
An employee can type the problem or use the voice function to describe the issue, add a photo if it’s needed, and choose how urgent the problem is.
After reporting the problem farmer will
get a notification and he can contact service
if needed. Or if your service mechanic is
registered in the app it will notify him.
