How TRACTIAN Creates Technologies Using Customer Feedback

When building a robust product that meets customer’s needs, you need to listen to those who use it most.

That’s why it’s important for TRACTIAN customers to know: we listen to machines, but we listen even more to those who take care of them.

We’re always seeking to improve our industry-leading products. That’s why we visit our customers, receive feedback, and listen carefully to their pains and suggestions – to transform the problem into innovative new solutions.

The TRACTIAN Product team is constantly developing new tools, all to facilitate and optimize the maintenance routine of front-line workers in the industry. A majority of these new ideas come from suggestions and honest feedback from the users of our solutions.

Idea Filtering and Execution

Each idea must be listened to and registered, even if it doesn’t start out as the best or most innovative. Sometimes the process of developing new features is long; it involves many teams and people focused on improving the products.

In practice, requests, suggestions, and even complaints are usually received by the Customer Success team. They’re composed of engineers who are in direct contact with the users, either online or in person.

Our CS engineers are trained to quickly identify and resolve customer pains. The resolution is often complex, and needs to go through the Product team. That’s where the features – or the platform’s functionalities – are created.

Smart Trac Ex is a smart vibration sensor made specifically for assets located in hazardous areas. It was originated by the need of several customers to monitor machines in extreme zones.

Of course, a new sensor takes a lot of time and testing to go to market – time that industries don’t have to waste. So, for a few months in 2022, we brought together the best IoT device developers from our Hardware team to come up with the solution to the problem. Thus, the most advanced and ultra-rugged Ex sensor on the market was born.

The technicians, planners, and maintainers that make up the teams from TRACTIAN’s customer companies made this kind of accelerated and assertive development possible. They provide us information, welcome our engineers to their plants, and point our experts in the right direction to create the best solutions.

“TRACTIAN is a business partner. Respect for the customer, dedication, search for solutions and long-term commitment are determining factors for the project’s success,” says a Yara Fertilizers Maintenance Specialist.

From Feedback to Upgrades

Between January and April 2023, more than 20 new tools were implemented on the TRACTIAN platform – in addition to corrections and improvements to existing tools.

There are many features, each with their own complexity and specific origin. That’s why we prepared the video below; it contains a summary of the main features that were recently implemented, and where to find them on the platform. All of these upgrades, without exception, were only possible thanks to the help and feedback from our users.

Temperature Monitoring with Seasonality

One of the key new features is the Regional Temperature Insight, which brings to life the long-awaited temperature monitoring with automatic seasonality control. 

Our solution engineers were always hearing questions from customers like: 

“If temperature alerts were trained during winter, does the platform generate insights during summer due to climate change?”

Our customers’ concern in this case was whether the maintenance alerts would be prepared for the temperature changes in the region where the plant is located. And, consequently, whether maintenance plans would be hampered by this.

To ensure that the sensors would be prepared and provide assertive insights in any season – regardless of when they were trained – our Hardware, Software, and Data Science teams worked tirelessly to improve the sensors’ collection and the platform’s Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

Now, thanks to the pains and questions expressed by our customers, the TRACTIAN platform uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the data collected during the training period, and automatically adjusts the acceptable threshold values for each season.

In other words, AI understands the temperature variation of the environment according to the region and compensates automatically, generating even more assertive alerts. 

Cost Reports

Another feature that was highly requested by customers using TracOS™ (our asset management CMMS) was Maintenance Cost Reports. 

The Reports tab of the TRACTIAN platform already had precise indicators and analysis of general costs of materials and man-hours. Even so, customers still depended on other tools – like manual analyses and calculations – to check in detail what was spent, and to have control of the year’s planned maintenance versus what was actually performed.

Aside from being more complete and automated, it was also necessary that the reports were exportable. This eliminates once and for all the need for other tools for cost analysis; TRACTIAN alone should be enough for clients to have all the expense reports needed to present to the board of directors in seconds. 

So, with the goal of improving their routines in mind, we listened to customers and improved the platform’s reports. Now, our clients have a complete dashboard with all the cost indicators necessary for complete maintenance management.

In addition to being able to configure the whole year’s maintenance budget in a calendar, there’s a huge range of automatic calculations that were developed based on the analyses most used by the customers. Now it’s possible to monitor costs per month, per category, per item, per type of material, per location, per asset, and per team, among others.

For a corporate maintenance management specialist at Yara, “One of the great highlights of TRACTIAN is precisely the ease and versatility of being able to adapt to any type of industry, even those that have their own peculiarities.” 

Continuous Product Upgrades and Improvements

As already mentioned, we developed about 20 new tools in the beginning of 2023 alone, not counting the eventual improvements.

Most of these tools have a great impact on both the platform and the users’ routine; they work almost like new products because they’re so extensive, complete, and complex, 

To learn more about the products and main features of each TRACTIAN solution, check out each one on our website, with their respective success stories, results, and testimonials from satisfied customers. You can also schedule a meeting with one of our engineers.