From the off, the team working with Stoneridge Electronics to design a new digital download device for commercial vehicle tachographs knew that the major obstacle it faced was getting the product right for potential customers.
The workforce was made up of middle aged or older people, mostly men, who had limited IT expertise but needed to easily accept the change from the paper disc system, which they’d been using for years. ‘We saw our biggest challenge as creating something that was simple to use. We didn’t want to frighten anyone,’ says Lesley Stokes from design agency London Associates.
An initial get together between Stoneridge representatives and the design firm London Associates, showed that managing the design project wasn’t going to be easy. It needed input from Stoneridge’s six different offices across Europe and the weekly telephone conference calls which were held throughout the design stage proved problematic. ‘It was a tough challenge to coordinate these meetings because it was across seven different languages,’ explains Stoneridge Engineering Manager Bob MacKinlay.
There were fewer problems getting the six offices to agree on a concept for Stoneridge's digital download device. Thanks to the customer profiling that Stoneridge had commissioned before even briefing a design team, London Associates came up with a handful of different concepts which all took account of the same constraints, and were a starting point for discussion.
The customer profiles showed that lorry fleet operators were normally small enterprises owning up to five vehicles. Drivers in the fleet weren’t young, had limited IT skills and were only interested in using a digital tachograph to meet and maintain their legal requirements cost effectively and with a system that was easy to manage, operate and understand.
Complete consensus on which concept to run with was reached fairly swiftly and the finished prototype wasn’t that far removed from this original concept.
‘What I had in mind was a simple device with minimal buttons’, says MacKinlay. ‘LA came back to us with three designs that matched the detailed design brief. The only thing different with the three different concepts were the image and aesthetics so it was an emotional "we like that, it's the best looking design" that swung the final decision.’
‘The look of the device exceeded what we had in mind. Once we had agreed on the general idea London Associates had some models made up from a block of plastic. It was shaped and milled and then painted and sprayed. We used it as a demonstration device to take to our key customers and it created a lot of excitement both internally and with our customers.’
The final product is made to be robust – it can withstand a drop test of 2 metres – easy to manufacture – it’s outer shell is made up of two simple shaped parts – and easy to use. The slot for a smart card with vehicle data has clear pointers on how to put in the card, there are LED lights to show when data is being downloaded, and when it’s stopped, and the product can be disassembled and separated for recycling at the end of its life. It can even – for those that liked the comfort of familiarity – show the same things on the screen as the old paper discs.
The digital download device, which was christened OPTAC, addressed the key issue of how to transfer the information from a tachograph onto a computer in an incredibly simple way. All lorry drivers carry a card that has a smart chip on it. This card is inserted into the vehicle’s tachometer which carries information about the vehicle. To retrieve this information all the drivers need to do is take the card out of the tachometer and insert it into the OPTAC device. Through pressing the relevant button (see right hand panel) the driver can perform a number of different functions and then the information can be downloaded onto a PC where it is processed using software developed by Stoneridge.
