Parsable
The future of industrial field work
Parsable started as Wearable Intelligence - a Google Glass company for hands-busy industrial workers. I did field research on construction sites and manufacturing floors in steel-toed boots, and what I found was that the hardware couldn't survive the field - but the documentation problem underneath it was enormous. Paper procedures that took months to update, no feedback loop, no way to see work in progress. Errors stemming from paper cost industry over 1 billion USD annually.
As one of two designers, I recommended we abandon the hardware and rebuild around software. The company restructured as Parsable, grew from Series A to Series B, and was eventually acquired.
I co-designed the entire system from the ground up: real-time collaborative field work on mobile, WYSIWYG procedure authoring, and the analytics that let organizations improve their procedures for the first time.
Designing the future of field work.
Field work makes communication tricky.
Procedures are the centerpiece of field work. Everyone uses them, collaborates on them, and are responsible for the integrity of them. Paper procedures make collaboration in the field tricky, when there is only one copy being passed around.
A collaborative field work tool.
Procedures have been printed on paper for decades. The thing is, paper is actually pretty good. On paper, you can modify procedures by scribbling things out, take notes in the margins, draw arrows, paperclip photos, you name it!
However paper has a major drawback - it’s a black box. A field worker’s colleague has to be physically looking at the sheet of paper to understand how the work is going.
Parsable’s system takes procedural work out of the black box, allowing everyone on a job site to collaborate in real time as steps are completed. This role based system allows an entire job site to work in concert to complete work faster, more safely, and more reliably than ever before.
Experts are a message away, and there are no more long truck rides to tell your buddy that he can start work on a valve since you have turned the pressure off.
The digital authoring tool with structured data.
We created a digital procedure authoring tool that gives industrial organizations much better control over their procedures. This system uses structured data blocks and a WYSIWYG interface to let people easily make the transition from their Microsoft Word based workflows into a new product.
The steps in the authoring tool are automatically translated into the field work tool and can be previewed by authors on the spot. These procedures are also now automatically versioned, and go through a customizable approval flow that used to take many email chains to accomplish.
Concurrent editing and version management means that organizations never lose information, and that subject matter experts can work alongside field technicians and engineers to create plain-language instructions for field workers.
Digitizing field data to provide new insights.
Since all of the procedural information in the Parsable system is entered digitally in the field, for the first time ever, industrial organizations are able to get real-time insights into the work being done in the field. On top of that, data is automatically logged, which gives organizations the opportunity to iterate on their procedures based on data.
For example, a company could note that one or two steps of a procedure take far longer than the other, and take steps to make that piece of the procedure faster.
This data gives insights that result in real time and money savings for companies that have it. Perhaps most importantly, this data dashboard allows companies to be proactive rather than reactive in regards to procedural non-adherence.
Instead of going back to find out why something went wrong, this dashboard allows organizations to see that steps weren’t completed properly (or at all) before something really bad happens.