Magna Unified Factory

Factory of the Future

Magna New Mobility is a division within Magna International - a Tier 1 Automotive Supplier and Fortune 500 company.

While other divisions of Magna focus on manufacturing car parts, New Mobility develops innovate technologies to push the automotive industry forward.

Unified Factory is a suite of applications that achieves this by optimizing several points of factory operations.
These solutions can save each individual plant over $2M+ per year!

Problem

poor utilization within factories

Many manufacturing plants within Magna were seeing poor optimization across their factory operations. 
This resulted in material handling forklifts having a poor utilization of ~68%, and freight trucks being only ~75% full.
Solving these issues is the focus of the primary two applications within the suite - SmartPick and SmartFreight.

Solution

automating decision making

Each application within the Unifed Factory Suite focuses on a specific point of the manufacturing process.

SmartPick - Material Handing Equipment (MHE) Picking
Manages forklift operators’ flow of tasks and guides them throughout the facility.
Tasks are created either by a supervisor, or automatically by the system - and then assigned to the best-fit truck.
Operators can create a queue of tasks which they will continuously work through, minimizing downtime.
By ensuring forklifts always have a queue of tasks prepared, optimization is improved to 90% - saving $150k per truck.

SmartFreight - Freight Truck Scheduling
Utilizes a algorithm to determine the optimal schedule of incoming freight to ensure trucks are at, or near full capacity.
Less trucks for the same amount of product leads to direct savings of $4k per truck, per line, per week.
With many facilities having 10 or more lines, this can grow to nearly $2M/year savings, at just one factory.

My role

UX Design Intern

As an intern, I joined the project after most research had already been completed.
My primary tasks were to organize a Magna UI design system, create interactive prototypes, and design sales collateral.

Photo of Sam at his desk at Magna office.

User Research

understanding the user

As an intern, the team had already completed much research by my arrival.

However, to help grow our understanding of our users, I translated those findings into personas and journey maps.
This created a shared understanding of who we’re solving for, and what it is they need. These focus on SmartPick.


Design System

Ensuring Proper Branding Across Products

New Mobility had been outsourcing UX design to third-party contractors up to this point.
I quickly noticed that their designs were completely out of alignment with Magna’s visual identity, due to a lack of any sort of design system or UI kit.

Project management knew this, which is why resolving it was one of the primary assignments of my internship.
I created a full Figma design system by translating the brand’s global brand standards into a library of components, text styles, and color styles.


UI Prototyping

Building Out the Product

With a design system in place, and thorough understanding of the user - I jumped into Figma to prototype SmartPick and SmartFreight.

SmartPick

SmartFreight


Sales Collateral

Promoting to Internal Stakeholders

Magna is very decentralized, meaning each plant can make independent decisions, such as the software, programs, and tools they use.
Because of this, we had to “sell” these solutions to our own people, to get them on board for software pilots.


The following one-pagers communicate the value of Unified Factory, SmartPick, and SmartFreight to those stakeholders.