Define Instruments helps industries stay safe, productive, and top of their game

For over 30 years, Define Instruments has been designing and manufacturing powerful electronics for large industries, including manufacturing and food processing. Their products, often custom-designed and made, solve many commercial problems, like measuring, controlling, automating, and enhancing performance, productivity, and safety. Their customers are spread across the English-speaking world from New Zealand and Australia to England, South Africa to the US.

One of their biggest customers is the dairy industry. They’ve designed and manufactured electronic equipment for cow sheds that automatically milks cows, measures the milk output, and keeps it fresh, clean, and delicious.

Define Instruments also helps keep forklift drivers safe, thanks to their technology that warns when the machinery is overloaded. Another piece of kit monitors, measures, and analyses energy usage – saving costs and the planet.

A defining moment: The Internet of Things needs next-level project management.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new and growing field for Define Instruments. Over recent years they have designed and built electronics that can control, monitor, and maintain equipment and output via the cloud; it’s now a significant part of their business.

While Define Instruments has designed and manufactured hundreds of products for dozens of industries, moving into IoT raised new challenges because it requires next-level dexterity. It’s safe to say handling multiple disciplines and processes create more complex project management.

Project and process management woes? Tech Systems and Jira deliver the goods.

In late 2019 Define Instruments engaged me, David Stokes from Tech Systems, to make the most of my Jira and project management expertise.

Their design team has seven research and development engineers working across cloud architecture, hardware, and user interface. These diverse and complex disciplines demand careful planning and communication to get the right tasks completed in the right sequence – think subtasks of subtasks.

We asked Define Instruments managing director Anthony Glucina why he didn’t want to move to Jira alone. His answer is fairly common:

They engaged me as project manager to learn how Jira works and to make use of its many benefits. Anthony agrees that, when it comes to making significant changes to the way you manage your processes, it’s important you engage someone with the right mindset and who is interested in the details.

Remote working because of Covid makes Jira even more useful.

With the onset of Covid and the move to remote working, Jira couldn’t have come at a better time for Define Instruments. Anthony says Jira works just as well over Zoom as it does when you’re sharing the same meeting room. They are so convinced of Jira’s benefits, that they’re now moving their knowledge base to Jira and Confluence, making it even easier to share ideas and communicate with one another.

Understandably, the move to Jira from their existing systems was not without some growing pains. But, after the initial teething issues, Anthony admits the engineers are now: “Pretty much letting Jira control their work lives.”

Another bonus: I also helped Define Instruments save valuable time around their ticket system. Instead of sending emails back and forth, clients can now lodge tickets directly onto their website portal, which automatically goes to Jira and can then be allocated to the right engineer to address.

Anthony says:

Two years on, I now adopt a consulting role, particularly around cloud architecture. When we asked Anthony what that’s like he said:

I’m proud to play an ongoing role in helping this multi-talented organisation produce clever technology for more productive, better-performing, safer and more efficient industries.