The Vuuch Solution Survey has created a bit of a stir.  One PLM professional, working for a big Koolaid producers had this to say:

Chris, while your survey is well intended, you clearly have missed the point in managing PLM information. Also, if you intended to generalize this survey, you might want to check your English and spelling.

I’m at a loss in figuring out what you’re trying to gain from the survey. The questions don’t relate to what companies are trying to sort out relative to PLM. Excel was the tool of choice for managing critical information and team communications at one time (perhaps 5-10) years ago. Companies that are succeeding have migrated to more formal database environments, such as PDM databases or even Access. Things are different now. I should say, any company that is using Excel to manage data management and communications presents a golden opportunity for improvement. Also, I see no mention of “value propositions” in your survey.

Chris, your objectives are laudable. But you need to “beef” up the survey questions to give substantive results and direction. Thanks for your efforts. 

Being an engineer my spelling skills are so so, so thanks for the heads up on that one.    Looking through his Koolaid colored glasses, designers have left their Excel files behind for PLM.  I agree that PLM provides a useful workflow tool, but I doubt PLM has reduced the amount of email sent or the number of Excel files created.  Product development requires intense communication and Engineers spend countless hours communicating with team members in order to make design decisions.  Simple tools have in no way been removed from the design process.  Tools like email and Excel are efficient and work.  No one is going to check email conversations or the odd Excel file into their PLM system.  It would be very valuable if they did, but they are not going to take the time to do this.  Why would a CAD user leave their CAD tool, go to email and save the file, start their PLM tool and then checkin the file to some node within the PLM tool????  Certainly if they did this it would be valuable, but it just won’t happen. 

Customers have responded well.  In one case I received an email from someone excited to see that someone is exploring the simple tools used throughout the design process.  Their company has been running PLM for years.  They go on to recognize the value contained in design discussions and the fact these discussions will never be part of their Windchill database.  They also offered to forward the survey to their user community.

I will continue to share survey results, so please pass the link along.  I am also working on a new survey, a more detailed survey, so please forward questions along or add them as comments to this post.  Improving Design Discussions represents a real value opportunity…

Dassault is trying hard to be new-aged…  WWW.3DVIA.com is up and running and although many DS employees don’t get the point, it is a great project because it really is new-age.  Inline with this new-age initiative they have also created a blog.  I wonder where they got this idea? 

Anyone willing to take a bet if they wrote their own blogging software?  Did they write their own blogging software or go open source?  In either case I wonder how they ended up with a license agreement in front of posting a comment blog?  I can jsut see a couple of very well dressed French lawyer types sitting around a big plate of cheese say ya but, someone might say something bad about us…  I believe DS is the first one ever to add a license agreement to a blog comment.  Maybe this has nothing to do with lawyers, maybe it is PLM fueled innovation.  In any case they did apply some great marketing to the license agreement by giving it a new name, “Blog Chart”.

So I closed out the votes and it ended at 50% : 50%!

Thursday I had a product overview discussion with one of our customer advisers.  Before we got into the nerdy stuff we of course spoke about the economy.  His company sells industrial products so you can imagine the the situation.  It is amazing how inner connected their world is.  They sell to the likes of the big_3, but they also buy major components from GM.  But it goes even further than that, they could loss more than 20% of their suppliers if the big_3 go under… 

Product development is even more inner connected.  We all know that there is only 6 degrees of separation between poeple.  I would bet this number needs to be recalculated, as the Internet has most likely reduce it.  But will it ever reduce the number to what it is in product development?  I don’t think so.  Why, you may ask?  Well, at Vuuch we have been researching the inner relationships or connections of “Design Discussions”.  These are the random discussions that take place between team members while they go about their days design tasks.  The reason we don’t call them conversations is that a conversation is verbal and a discussion could use any communication method.  The distinction may seem meaningless, but it seems design discussion are greatly electronic…  Go figure, right, you are reading a blog!  Lets get back to degrees of separation - It is a simple fact, that everything in a design project is related.  Well maybe not everything.  Although we have not calculated an official number you can bet it is damn near 2.  Or at least you will have a feeling of what it is in your environment.  What I mean is that if I decided something in my cubical, it will have an affect on close to everyone on the team.  And if you and I decide something in an email discussion, there are many people who are affected that have no idea about what was just decided and they will most likely find themselves in the next team meeting saying – “Boy i wish i knew that”.  Wouldn’t it be great if Outlook told me what everyone has done that ruined my day?

We just launched on our solution page a review of how we frame the customers problem.  As we gather data we will post the responses on a page that is yet defined.  Please pass around the link.  The solution page will change over time to better reflect where we are in releasing our product.  As stated on our home page we strongly beleive in customer feedback throughout the design, development and release of our product.  Initially we will use surveys as a means of doing this.  Once we have a prototype we will allow people to register for the beta.

Thanks.

Spent the morning working with IM tools.  Been testing some obscure things like http://www.teamcondition.com/ created by http://mytton.net/ and using more industry used tools like http://persistent.im/Home.jsp.  While these look like they work, menaing fundtion, I find them difficult to use/find effective.  As part of this we ended up surfing through twitter and created an account there.  You can twitter me at vuuch.

The day of the find I did a little googling and found someone who not only knew the history but actually restored the phone for us. My kids can’t imagine we used to wait for the dail to spin back… It is amazing how technology has wired a world so old. The phone dates from 1937 – 1945. The reason for the range is that someone had been maintaining/upgrading it over the years. Many of the parts are very rare. What is even more amazing is that in the restoration, all the external cords on the phone were replaced with original cords. Where do you think the cords came from? You’re right if you guessed google. A guy in Texas owns and runs the original machines that made these cords in the 30’s.

Vuuch Voice is up and running and almots connected to the vuuch domain.  I think i need to reinstall to either a sub domain and/or to /blog rather then /wordpress.  Maybe I can get Alex to help me with some of this…

So we just installed wordpress and have a blog attached to our yet to be complete web site.  It is all very exciting, yet all very incompleteeeeee!  The great thing is I never had to call them or get on a forum.  Well I did need to make some changes to my www.godaddy.com hosting site.  They made me switch from a Windows server to a Linux server.  They could not explain why but oh well… sorry Bill.