Helping factories

plan smarter,

move faster

scale production

with Ziso Zero

ZISO Zero powers Zetwerk’s manufacturing network, tracking suppliers, materials, and production timelines. I led the redesign of ZISO Zero, rebuilding it as a flexible system that unites planning, tracking, and delivery across Zetwerk’s operations.

My Role

Senior UX Designer

Timeline

5 months
2021

Company

Zetwerk

Impact

+236 % Adoption

Team

Senior Product Designer (myself)

1x Product Manager

3x Planning Engineer

4x Program Managers

5x Developers

3x QA

grayscale photo of crane in front of building

WHY MANUFACTURING PRECISION MATTERS?

Every delay costs more than time

ZISO Zero was designed for a single business unit but couldn’t flex with new workflows. As more teams joined, planners struggled to fit their processes into a one-size system, leading to frustration, lost time, and disconnected data.


Each team had different needs, but one shared problem: the system’s structure could not match the pace of manufacturing.

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PROBLEM

A system built for structure couldn’t scale with speed

User interviews revealed rigid hierarchies, redundant metadata, and limited supplier mapping, which slowed ZISO's ability to adapt.

Interviews across four operational barriers that limited adoption:

6

hrs

PLANNING ENGINEERS

Spends on creating “dummy lots” to track a single item.

2

days

PROGRAM MANAGERS

Relied on Excel and WhatsApp for visibility, delaying updates by 1–2 days.

65%

Contracts

OPERATIONS TEAM

Couldn’t assign multiple suppliers to different manufacturing stages, causing coordination gaps across production lines.

16%

PROJECTS

Fully tracked inside ZISO.

The rest existed in scattered sheets and emails.

SOLUTION

Rebuilding ZISO as a flexible, modular system

ZISO 2.0 was redesigned to scale horizontally while preserving manufacturing precision.

01

Bulk Create and Track

An Excel-compatible interface mirrored existing habits while automating validations, letting teams upload and track thousands of items in one go.

02

Item-Level Planning

Planners could now create, allocate, and track items individually. Each stage of production could be linked to a different supplier and order, cutting setup time per contract

from 40 minutes to 12 minutes.

03

Modular Architecture

All actions were reorganized into four modules: Configure, Define, Plan, Track, reducing cognitive load and onboarding time for new users by 70%.

IMPACT

Precision turned into measurable progress

For the first time, planners, program managers, and leadership shared a single, real-time source of truth.

+236

%

Adoption in one quarter

+48

%

Data accuracy

across operations

70

%

Quicker onboarding for new units

HOW DID WE GET THERE?

Process

I worked closely with engineers to validate every change through weekly design–dev syncs and workflow reviews. Each discovery informed design refinements that simplified flows, automated dependencies, and prioritized visibility over control.


During development, several deeper systemic issues emerged:

USER RESEARCH

Fragmented Execution

Disconnected stages and siloed tools made end-to-end production tracking slow and error-prone. Tracking gaps increased setup time by 3–5 days per project and

forced 65% of teams to rely on manual workarounds.

DIARY STUDY

Reactive Decision Loops

Teams relied on delayed updates, forcing them to respond reactively rather than plan proactively. Decisions lagged by 18–24 hours, leading to ~12% slower order completion and missed delivery windows.

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Template Fatigue

Rigid input forms and repetitive setup steps slowed new project onboarding and adoption. 69% of project setups required manual data entry, increasing setup time by 30–40%

per order.

USABILITY STUDY

Dependency Overload

Supplier and internal updates depended on manual coordination, creating workflow bottlenecks. Only 16% of projects had complete tracking, resulting in ~22% reporting discrepancies and delayed issue detection.

Strategy & Planning

After collecting evidence by investigating problems from multiple angles,

I translated research insights into a game plan for the design.

EXPERIENCE STRATEGY

Designing flexibility into factory planning

Workflow mapping across planning engineers and program managers showed how rigid lot-based tracking slowed projects. Teams created separate Excel sheets for small orders because ZISO required every item to fit a fixed structure.

Using insights from the ZISO 2.0 PRD, I reframed the goal from improving accuracy to enabling flexibility so every business unit could plan differently without rebuilding the system each time.

Configure

BU level settings to allow smoother and faster setup of projects on ZISO


Define

Defining the various attributes of the item to be used during planning and tracking


Plan

Plan out the entire item journey from raw material to the finished good complete with process, timeline, etc.

Track

Compare the progress of the item against the set plan



INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Simplifying supplier coordination

Reviewing the Planning Module PRD revealed deep dependencies between supplier assignment, template setup, and production planning.

A visual dependency map helped identify where users got trapped in redundant steps.
I restructured the flow to allow stage-level order allocation, making supplier coordination faster and easier to manage.

This simplified architecture later became the backbone for ZISO’s planning experience.

ROADMAP DEFINITION

Focusing on adoption levers

While reviewing the ZISO 2.0 backlog, I led a strategy session to prioritize features by operational value.We focused on item-level tracking, multi-supplier allocation, and modular configuration, the three design levers most likely to boost adoption.

PHASE 1

Planning Module

Eliminates deep links/constraints which allows ZISO to scale horizontally and plan faster, bringing in more BUs like NAB Prototype, Ecosystem, as well as to onboard any other BU in future with minimal development effort.

PHASE 2

Planning Module

Eliminates deep links/constraints which allows ZISO to scale horizontally and plan faster, bringing in more BUs like NAB Prototype, Ecosystem, as well as to onboard any other BU in future with minimal development effort.

Lower-impact features such as advanced reports were moved to later phases, allowing early pilots to validate results faster across two business units.

REFRAMING THE PROBLEM

Rigid planning workflows slowed operational visibility

Planners at Zetwerk relied on static templates, siloed tracking sheets, and manual data updates to monitor production and supplier progress. These disconnected workflows made it difficult to adapt to changes in real time, leading to slow decisions and frequent communication gaps across departments.

How might we help planners track production and supplier progress dynamically without relying on manual updates?

DEEPER INSIGHTS

Uncovering operational friction beneath the data

To understand why planning felt broken, I interviewed Zetwerk’s internal operations teams, contractors, and program managers across multiple business units. Conversations revealed a pattern: planners weren’t just struggling with tools, they were wrestling with how work itself was structured.

I joined PMs in their daily Excel tracking rituals, sketching early concepts directly within their sheets to visualize how production data flowed (and often broke) between teams. These experiments surfaced key bottlenecks like rigid order templates, inconsistent supplier updates, and missing real-time visibility.

What are your day to day responsibilities?

Which are the products that you use on daily basis?

What are the current constraints that you have identified while working with Ziso?