RelCare

The Challenge

Hitachi Energy manages critical electrical infrastructure — substations that distribute power to communities and industries. These substations contain complex equipment that requires regular maintenance, condition monitoring, and eventual replacement. Managing the health and maintenance of these assets across a global portfolio is a significant operational challenge.

Field engineers and maintenance planners needed a unified platform to monitor equipment health, schedule maintenance activities, and make data-driven decisions about asset lifecycle management.

My Role

I was the UX designer for RelCare, Hitachi Energy's substation maintenance and asset management platform. My responsibility covered the core user experience — from asset health dashboards to maintenance workflow management.

The Approach

I conducted research with multiple user roles across different regions to understand how maintenance processes vary by equipment type, age, and operational context. The key finding was that users needed both a high-level portfolio view (which assets need attention soon?) and deep asset-level detail (what's the condition history of this specific transformer?).

The design balanced these two perspectives, creating a system that supported both strategic planning and day-to-day maintenance operations.

Key Design Decisions

• Asset health dashboard: At-a-glance view of the entire asset portfolio with color-coded health indicators, filterable by region, equipment type, and criticality level
• Condition timeline: Historical view of each asset's health metrics over time, helping engineers spot degradation trends before they become failures
• Maintenance workflows: Structured task flows for scheduling, executing, and documenting maintenance activities — designed to work on both desktop and tablet for field use
• Data-driven recommendations: Interfaces that surface AI-generated maintenance recommendations alongside the underlying data, giving engineers the context to make informed decisions

Outcome

RelCare provided Hitachi Energy's maintenance teams with a modern, unified platform for managing substation assets — replacing fragmented tools and manual processes with a data-driven approach to maintenance planning and execution.