Axis
Product Designer
A cement plant, from quarry to dispatch, on one spine.
Cement plant automation — quarry to dispatch on a single spine, so an operator moves along the process instead of between vendor screens.
Neutral grey carries all the structure. One pastel cyan carries meaning, and only three: a value under live control, the active navigation item, or a number that needs a decision. Nothing else is coloured.
Cement plant automation. The plant itself runs as one continuous process, from quarry through crusher, raw mill, kiln, cement mill and dispatch. The software watching it usually does not: it tends to be a stack of unrelated screens, one per machine supplier. Axis puts the whole line on a single spine so an operator follows the material instead of hopping between vendors.
The brief
Cement manufacturing is continuous and unforgiving. A stoppage anywhere upstream carries down the line, and the people watching for it are process engineers on shift, reading numbers in a control room for hours at a stretch.
The goal I set was narrow on purpose: one concise product that carries the whole flow of industrial software, instead of the collection of vendor consoles a plant usually ends up operating. Every decision below comes back to that.
The research
The study ran on two sources. The first was people. My father spent years at Votorantim and I have friends working in cement now, so the plant was already something I could ask real questions about, and that is why the project starts at the process instead of at a screen.
The second was documented practice. Process control is one of the few software fields where the interface conventions are written down and argued over in public standards, so every decision here could be checked against something firmer than taste.
What the standards already say
Two documents govern most of what a plant interface should do, and they point the same way. ISA-101, the standard for high performance HMI, asks for almost entirely grey screens: normal equipment drawn as grey outlines on a grey field, a muted palette throughout, and saturated colour held back for abnormal conditions and states that need a person. The screen is supposed to be boring while the plant is fine.
EEMUA 191 covers the other half, which is how much the plant is allowed to say. Its steady state benchmarks are unusually blunt for a standard, and they are the reason a quiet interface is a safety argument rather than an aesthetic one.
How much a plant may say
EEMUA 191 rates an alarm system by how often it interrupts one operator in steady state. Past roughly twelve an hour the system is working against the person reading it.
alarms per hour, one operator, steady state
- Acceptable: 6 (about one every ten minutes)
- Manageable: 12 (one every five minutes)
- Over-demanding: 30 (one every two minutes)
- Unacceptable: 60 (more than one a minute)
An interface that colours everything is making the same mistake as an alarm system that fires constantly. Both spend the attention of the operator before anything has gone wrong.
EEMUA 191 steady-state performance bands
One colour, three meanings
The rule the whole interface is built on.
Surfaces are neutral grey and carry structure. A single pastel cyan carries meaning, and only three: a value under live control, the active navigation item, or a number that needs a decision. Nothing else is coloured. The diagram is drawn in the accent of this page rather than the cyan of the product.
Why so little colour
Plant software traditionally colours everything: green for running, blue for auto, yellow for warning, red for alarm. Past a certain density none of it registers any more, and operators end up navigating by position instead.
So Axis uses cyan once and spends nothing else. Grey carries all the structure, which means the eye finds cyan straight away, and cyan only ever says one of three things. A screen with none on it is a screen that wants nothing from you.
The process line
Nine sections, quarry to dispatch, always in physical order.
Every section carries its plant tag, 2-CR-010 or 2-MI-100, so the screen and the equipment are called the same thing. The order never changes, which lets an operator find a section by where it sits.
Where the electricity goes
Grinding takes roughly 60 to 70 per cent of the electrical energy in a plant, split across the two mills. That is the clearest reason the raw mill and the cement mill sit at the top level of the navigation instead of inside a submenu.
approximate share of plant electrical energy
- Finish grinding: 38 (cement mill)
- Raw grinding: 33 (raw mill)
- Everything else: 29 (kiln, fans, conveying, packing)
Navigation follows cost as well as material. The two sections that dominate the power bill are also the two an engineer is most often asked about.
Published cement industry averages, around 110 to 120 kWh per tonne overall
Reading the kiln
Specific heat is the number a pyro engineer lives by, which is why it sits in the header of the line overview rather than three screens down. The figure on the reference screen is 3 142 kJ/kg, and the point of the chart is that it lands where a real modern kiln lands.
kJ per kg of clinker
- Chemistry alone: 1800 (theoretical mineralogical demand)
- Best available tech: 3000 (modern dry kiln benchmark)
- On the Axis screen: 3142 (the value shown in the header)
- Older wet kiln: 5440 (low end of the wet-process range)
A headline figure is useless without a reference, so the screen shows it against a seven-day mean. Without that, 3 142 is a number nobody can act on.
Published kiln heat-balance benchmarks
Navigation
Three groups. Process follows the material through the plant, analysis is for looking back at what happened, and management covers what gets reported outward.
Process: Line overview, Pyro line, Raw mill, Cement mill, Packing & dispatch
Analysis: Alarms & events, Historian, Quality & lab
Management: Energy & emissions, Asset health, Reports
The line overview
The default screen, and the one an engineer leaves open. Four tabs sit on it: Summary, Mimic, Production and Shift log.
- Headline figures. Clinker production against target, and specific heat against a seven-day mean
- Process line. All nine sections with live rate and state, in physical order
- Kiln stability. The last eight hours of it, on the same screen as the live figures
- Context bar. Plant and line at the top, signed-in engineer at the bottom
Equipment state
States are spelled out in words. Only "Controlled" also takes the accent, because that is the one state where a human decision is currently holding.
| State | Meaning | Carries accent |
|---|
| Running | Operating within its own limits, no attention needed | No |
| Controlled | A setpoint is being actively held or overridden | Yes |
| Stopped | Not running, planned or otherwise | No |
| Fault | Escalated to Alarms & events | No, handled there |
Reading rules
Conventions applied to every number on every screen.
- Units always shown. t/d, kJ/kg, t/h. A figure never appears on its own
- Always a reference. A value appears against a target, a mean or a limit
- Tabular figures. Digits align between rows so a column can be scanned at a glance
- Tags are shared. The screen uses the same identifier painted on the equipment
Open the Figma file
Industrial, SCADA, Data Density, Dark UI