It is this time of the year again – the time when we reflect on what has happened and start preparing for an exciting new year. As the final blog post for 2022, we thought it was a good opportunity to look deeper into the milestones from this year and delve into how customers and partners will benefit from Visavi now being part of Kongsberg Digital. We’ve talked to Visavi’s VP of Product, Kenneth Ådalen, who is working closely with existing customers and is responsible for the product strategy and roadmap.
“2022 has been a really interesting year for Visavi both as a company and as a product. We have continued strengthening the superpowers we provide our users and at the same time been concentrating on our product’s future", says Visavi’s VP of Product, Kenneth Ådalen.
Since joining Visavi in July 2021, Kenneth has focused on getting to know the root cause of the problems Visavi is solving for existing and new customers to create the best possible solution.
He describes Visavi as a highly competent and engaged company where there are no boring days, and the employees have a lot of fun together. Every day is a party (almost).
“We work with autonomous cross-functional teams which have specialist knowledge about their domains. It’s so inspiring to see how the different teams come up with products and solutions based on problems our customers and users experience”, says Kenneth Ådalen.
Visavi’s product differentiation and market position
Unlike many other SAAS, Visavi is a solution used by an entire organization and supports a variety of situations and users. According to existing customers, Visavi can be thought in less than 20 minutes and no sit-down training is required. The fact that one can access and update all the source systems directly from Visavi significantly simplifies the users’ working day.
“The uniqueness of Visavi lies in the solution’s ability to combine integrated complex plans in a simple and intuitive collaboration arena. The core value of Visavi is the ability to share situational awareness immediately and give the whole organization the exact same picture of their maintenance plans. This is crucial in high-paced environments with a focus on safety and efficient execution. In seconds you get the whole picture without the need of involving highly pressured resources. When you have shared situational awareness in place and have the complete picture of your integrated maintenance plans, you can act on unexpected situations. We all know a plan is outdated the second you print it. With Visavi, you can quickly act and re-schedule activities when needed. All in all, Visavi enables users to both get an exact picture of the plan and to be able to act and adapt to changes based on unforeseen incidents quickly. We give our users superpowers to safely execute plans and quickly change and shift focus”, says Kenneth.
Visavi’s VP of product, Kenneth Ådalen, demonstrates Visavi.
This year’s development journey
To really understand the value and potential of Visavi, it is key to see and try the solution.
“One of the biggest challenges during 2021 was the contact with our end-users. The pandemic blocked us from getting close to them and being able to observe and feel their problems in day-to-day work. Finally, in 2022 we have slowly got back to a new normal where we are allowed to travel and meet customers and users again. Without close contact with customers and our users, the risk of ending up with a purely technical product is increasing and we have no ambitions of becoming such a company", Kenneth explains.
Kenneth emphasizes that close contact and collaborations with the industries have always been and will continue to be Visavi’s key to development moving forward as well.
“We rapidly release improvements to our solution and the 2022 version of Visavi is more responsive and robust. We have worked hard to create robust building blocks that can self-heal if anything happens. Besides that, we have also added many useful features to give our users even more superpowers”, he adds.
New product releases during 2022 include smart links, updating activity status, and improved rescheduling.
This year, Visavi has done a big job optimizing the data exchanges with source systems, making the solution even more responsive. All the new features released this year will help Visavi users become far more empowered in terms of situational awareness and the ability to act when unforeseen events occur.
All development at Visavi is led through product teams that run a structured discovery process to be able to identify the problems to solve.
“Everything we develop must somehow be related to one or more problems that users experience”, Kenneth says. He clarifies that their job during the discovery process is to identify whether a problem is worth solving.
Kenneth explains that in such processes, the teams work closely with the customer who has identified the specific problem and with other customers to secure that a new feature or improvement also creates value for other customers.
Updating the activity status in Visavi is an example of a solution to a problem identified this year. Existing customers reported challenges related to not having a fully updated picture of the plan status. Today, one can easily update this in Visavi so that everyone can see which activities have started, are completed, and are delayed. For the users, the root of the problem was related to the cumbersome process of updating the status per activity through the source systems.
The feature that allows users to update activity status directly in Visavi was launched in August and lead to a significant increase of active Visavi users.
“It was evident that this new feature quickly was a success. Our user statistics shows that 200-300 activities are updated through Visavi every day and 500-600 activities during a turnaround”, says Kenneth Ådalen.
Throughout 2022, the number of daily Visavi users has significantly gone up. At Visavi’s office in Sarpsborg, a large screen shows live user statistics. Seeing where, when and by whom the solution is being used has been both inspiring and helpful to continue securing customer satisfaction.
“If we play around with numbers, I think it’s realistic to say that users save 5 minutes per activity they update. If a user updates 200 activities a day on average, the average is 73 000 updated activities every year. 5 minutes saved per activity equals 6 083 hours saved per year for this user. These numbers are based on assumptions and usage statistics. It's also worth noting that these calculations are based on one person updating the activity. How much time will a company save if you also include the time all supporting functions save by empowering their users to do this directly?”, Kenneth speculates.
Ådalen continues: “Being acquired by Kongsberg Digital gives us a unique position to continue to evolve in a highly competent and ambitious company. This will help us take our product and its features to the next level”.
Kenneth shows how one easily can see more details on a specific work order in Visavi.
In March 2022, the Visavi team gathered at their offices in Sarpsborg and made a demo video of the solution. The result of this teamwork has been very well received in the market. It gives a user-friendly introduction to the solution by showing typical examples of situations and users that Visavi will support from the initial plan creation and scheduling to the daily use and execution of planned work. Check it out here.
Entering 2023 as a Kongsberg Digital company
On the 14th of November this year, it was announced that Visavi was acquired by Kongsberg Digital, a leading provider of next-generation software and digital solutions to customers within maritime, oil and gas, renewables, and utilities.
More resources and broader knowledge are now united, which will improve both technologies for optimizing operations and maintenance in heavy asset industries. Being acquired by Kongsberg Digital will help Visavi evolve and gain even more speed in future development. A result of this acquisition is a unique combination of applications and definitively an industry 5.0 offer for existing and new customers.
“The combination of our products will create unique user experiences connecting data and visualization to real-time execution and situational awareness. Combining data on its own is not enough to give the users superpowers, you must provide them with skills and tools they don’t have today. I strongly believe that we can change the business and how the companies work”, Ådalen says.
