Almetra AI — Nik Zechner

Almetra AIformerly Deltia

Designing an enterprise product from 0 to 1 to help line leaders take action.

01 — The problem

Lots of data. Now what?

For the first time, manufacturing companies could see what was happening on their lines, and we turned it into data. The only problem: how do you make that data actionable?

02 — Version one

The dashboard

The dashboard gave line leaders the main KPIs and helped them find bottlenecks by product, day or station. It looked cool, but it was hard to know what to do with it.

Live prototype

Try it: open Filters, switch between Stack, Combine and Compare, or hover a bar.

What worked

Main KPIs at a glance
Powerful filters to find bottlenecks

What didn’t

Took time to analyze
No clear next step

03 — Research

What we learned

Shop-floor managers are busy. They don’t have time to analyze dashboards, and when they do, they only look at today and yesterday. The only station that really matters is the bottleneck of the line.

Thinking-aloud test on the Birdeye prototype over a video call — Interviews, thinking-aloud tests and design syncs. Names hidden.

Design sync with the team — Interviews, thinking-aloud tests and design syncs. Names hidden.

Day-to-day journey map: first visit of the day, throughout the day, end of shift — A line lead’s day, from first visit to end of shift.

04 — Insights

From charts to answers

Each station gets one column with its key KPI and at most two insights in plain language: what’s wrong, where, and what to do. Resolving one takes a tap, and the feedback trains the model.

Live prototype

State

Theme

Try it: resolve an insight, hover the hourly pills, or open the shift report.

One column per stationIts key KPI, plus one pill per hour to show when things went wrong.
Ranked insightsFour types, so the icon alone tells you how urgent it is.
Resolving is feedbackEvery answer teaches the model what’s worth flagging.

05 — The design system

The design system

Built on shadcn/ui, so engineers could ship the designs as they are. Every component covers every state: empty, loading, error, shift change, light and dark.

Component states from the library. Flip through them.

06 — The handover

One report for the next shift

At shift change, everything rolls into one report: a short summary, the main KPIs and the insights worth keeping. Numbers that aren’t final yet show a question mark instead of a value that changes later.

Live prototype

Theme

Try it: switch stations or shifts, hover the bars, or share the report.

07 — What’s next

Ask Almetra

The next step: anyone on the line can just ask, and get an answer with the chart that proves it and the next action.

This is a concept, not part of the live app.

Concept

Concept: example questions and answers on a loop.

08 — Outcome

What changed

Almetra raised a €16M Series A and now serves $1B+ companies with its insights. I helped the team figure out what really matters, and designed it so engineers could ship it easily.