In an amazing blast from the past DEVO is back with a new album.  Who remembers Whip It?  Makes me think of Vuuch It.  Want to learn how to Vuuch It then check out the up and coming webinars http://vuuch.com/company/events. 

Learn how and why Vuuch becomes part of your vocabulary within weeks of your first Vuuch.  Customers tell us that shortly after using Vuuch they find themselves shout out Vuuch in the hall and meetings.  It becomes common the find people in meetings saying “Vuuch it” or “Vuuch knows” or just yelling Vuuch for the fun of it.

These webinars will walk through a series of use case examples of how to start using Vuuch inclusive of live Q&A.  If you just can’t wait to Vuuch then signup and getting Vuuching.  If you have specific use cases questions that you would like to get answered then forward them along to contact@vuuch.com.

Don’t be afraid.  There is nothing like your first Vuuch!

Anyone that has managed a project or anyone that will, should look at this picture.  Although very funny it is also very accurate.  It has been a long time since I’ve seen this but today while on a little Google I ran across it.  Reading it and laughing out loud I decided to save it by drafting a quick post (the best way to ever find it agian is to add some context to the image).  IMHO this image is well aligned to the power of Vuuch and why we find Vuuch becomes part of the vocabulary within our users companies.  The main reason why these 10 views of a simple product exist has to do with the complexity of managing communication, expectations and the ability to keep people on the same page, especially when things are changing at a dramatic pace, as they do in any project. 

By now it is clear to everyone that the most common way to manage a project is check lists and piles of emial.  We all do it, even in the management of stuff in our personal lives.  Just look at how many list management applications there are in the istore.  And ask a friend if they are a crosser outer or a checker offer and they know what you are talking about…

The best way to reduce the number of images for this simple product is to improve how you manage the list of issues, things to be discussed and the tasks that need to get completed.  Let me tie this back to a Vuuch customer.  Just before finding this I was speaking with one of our users who has just completed a project.  He was telling me about how Vuuch had helped…  The excitement in his voice was great, but better than that was how he would use Vuuch in a sentence – “Even though we might not be responsible for the next design phase my manager told me to Vuuch all the known issues that need to be addressed in the next design cycle”.  The next team that works on the product will have the known issues documented as part of the design files (in this case SolidWorks) as well as having access to the design history stored in Vuuch.

Now I need to find the one of the gun salesmen standing at the tent where the chief is walking out the back door and yelling I have no time to talk to a salesmen, I have a war to fight…

Jim Brown started a healthy debate about PLM and ERP in a post about SAP.  The discussion spilled over to the linked-in PLM CAD/CAM Group.

One point of debate has to do with iteration and state control.  Two camps formed around the idea that PLM is an application that supports a highly iterative process and ERP is a solution which does not support iteration (Camp 1 = PLM captures iteration and Camp 2 = ERP does not capture iterations).  Of course product development is iterative.  But it seems to me the data in ERP also goes through iterations since ERP records versions, configurations, inventory use up and effectivity dates.  It seems a bit circular to say design is iterative and therefore PLM is iterative which reminds me of Jesse Craig declaring my position as shortsighted and a blatant logical fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_a_disjunct.  Maybe Jesse was right.  I was motivated by stirring the pot.

To simplify let’s take a simple case of a single part that is being designed and managed in PLM.  The part goes through a series of versions due to iterations, some of which are captured on the designers desktop and some of which are captured when the file is checked in (as a result some files states are not captured).  Even in this single part example there are many drivers to the iterations.  For example the part needs to fit into/onto something, there are material requirements, vendor selection issues, quality control requirements/approaches and on and on…  Again to simplify let’s say the part is at some state of design and that during a team meeting a number of issues are captured that the team agrees to resolve.  Lets classify these issues into two groups where the first group requires the CAD designer to change the model and the second group will not. 

Focusing first on the issues that require model changes and imagining that in order to make the appropriate changes the CAD designer needs to go back and forth with a number of different people.  These people are basically helping the designer determine the appropriate geometric result.  Going out on a logical limb I will say that you can draw a direct parallel between those involved and the geometric result.  What I mean by this is that each person’s perspective can have a direct relationship to what gets modeled.  To further define this point we will imagine that the geometry in questions is a simple concave round:

• The designer might look at this as just a round. 
• The FEA person may see this as something that induces stress. 
• The industrial designer may see this as impacting the visual appeal of the component.
• The manufacturing engineer may look at this as something that drives up the price of the machined part. 

A round is never just a round.  In our case multiple perspectives drove the final outcome of the model.  If you continue this example, it is simple to see how maybe each of the people mentioned above came into the discussion with the designer one at a time and therefore the round went through a series of values and that none of these iterations were saved back into PLM.  As well I think it is safe to say PLM has no idea about who the designer engaged in order determine the finial value of the round.  After all the back and forth the designer checks the part back into PLM.  So what does PLM know, the state or the iteration?

Looking at now the second set of issues we will imagine these as having to do with vendor selection.  Let me first set the stage.  During the development of the part a vendor was selected from the approved vendor list and in parallel the targeted vendor failed a vendor audit.  The project manager gets an email from purchasing that the selected vendor will be removed from the approved vendor list and therefore cannot be targeted for his project.  The project manager now has a new item for his list of he must fix before releasing the part.  The project manager, manufacturing engineer, quality engineer and purchasing person sit down to discuss how to resolve this problem and as a result:

• The manufacturing engineer is tasked to visit the vendor and evaluate the cause for failure.
• Purchasing introduces a new potential supplier.
• The quality engineer is tasked with evaluating if the new potential supplier could provide the new part as a ship-to-stock item (there is a requirement for no incoming inspection).
• The project managers issues a purchase order to one of their prototype suppliers for a quantity of parts that will meet the first level of demand (these end up getting made before the final change and therefore need to be reworked in house in order to be used).

In this case we will say that all these people got together all at once in a team meeting where they decided who would do what.  In this case the team has set off in multiple directions most of which are some how related to ERP data.  The potential new supplier “at some point” would need to be entered into ERP, the status for the failed supplier would be altered in ERP and the PO for to the prototype supplier would be in ERP.  Would ERP know why the new supplier was added, or why the supplier status changed, or why the PO was issued and what of this information would be found in PLM?  What about the quality engineer and the investigation into the failure?  Where would this information be found?  I think it is safe to say that there is only one place you would find this information.  The project manager has all of this in his inbox and on his list of things that need to be resolved.  I think it is also safe to say that maybe a comment is added in ERP when the vendor is added, the status is changed and the PO is issued.  Even if this was done has ERP captured the iteration or the state?

Certainly in both cases the team used an iterative approach and as a result data/assets/deliverables went through a series of states.  But I would argue that in both cases neither the PLM or ERP systems captured anything other than the state change.  Reflecting on this post I would also challenge the terminology of iteration and state and declare that better terms might be CAUSE and RESULT.  Understanding why something changed (CAUSE) is very different than understanding the result of the change (RESULT/STATE).  This idea is a fundamental part of the regulations created in the 90′s for the medical device market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHF.  A driving force to these changes, from what I know, was the fact that patients were being injured even though the product that created the injury was a valid release (RESULT/STATE).  The resulting regulations have been setup under the notion that in order to evaluate the (STATE/RESULT) of a released product you must be able to evaluate what drove the result (CAUSE).  So in our case above you would need to prove how you came to the value of the round and what you did to validate that the value released would not impact the product in a negative way.  As well you would need to be able to show why the vendor went from one vendor to another and that this also had no negative impact on the product.  As you can imagine this is not as simple as knowing the state of any bit of data.

In conclusion I would STATE that PLM and ERP both deal with data that is ITERATIVE and both capture the STATES of their respective data but neither understand CAUSE.

Vuuch needs your vote. Vuuch has been selected to present at Mass Innovation Nights (http://massinnovationnights.com/), that is if we get enough votes. The four top slots get a chance to present and the all of the invites get a table at the next event. The event is held at the IBM Innovation center in Waltham MA. Please check out the event page and please give Vuuch your VOTE http://massinnovationnights.com/products/january-13-innovators-vote-here. We are trailing currently but with a little support from our community I know we will be in the top spot.

I have not posted in oh so long.  Well I was reading this and found it funny so I decided to reblog it.  I figured if I can retweet then it is ok to reblog…

I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.

I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.

There is great need for a sarcasm font.

Did we ever learn how to fold a fitted sheet?

Was learning cursive really necessary?

Map Quest really needs to start their directions on #5.  Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.

Bad decisions make good stories.

You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren’t going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.

Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray?   I don’t want to have to restart my collection…again.

I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.

“Do not machine wash or tumble dry” means I will never wash this – ever.

I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Damn it!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What’d you do after I didn’t answer? Drop the phone and run away?

I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.

I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

My 4-year old son asked me in the car the other day “Dad what would happen if you ran over a ninja?”  How the hell do I respond to that?

I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lites than Kay.

PLM systems have been touted as the next generation of product development technology for just about 10 years! WOW!!! It is hard to believe it has actually been this long, time flies when your having fun… Massive amounts of spending and value has been created through the advent and installation of PLM, but are we done? No we are not, cycle times must be faster, designs must now be green and quality is expected. The battle for time to market continues. PLM and CAD have both done tons to shortened the development cycle. CAD makes a designer more effective and PLM makes release more effective. While I have not fully qualified this I think that prior advances in CAD happened about every 10 years. Pro/ENGINEER had about a 10 year run before the slump and if I am right this was about the same for the prior CAD systems. So what does that say for SolidWorks which is somewhat over 10 years old and what about PLM being 10 years long in the tooth?

I will borrow Oleg’s simplification position and simplify the development process into three simple states – Design, Release and Manufacture. Both the Release and Manufacture stages can be defined as stages that require a rigid and controlled approach, while the Design stage is defined by terms like uncontrolled, discovery, trade-off and innovation. Another way to characterize these is to say Release and Manufacture is about controlling the result or finished entities of the product and how they are combined while the Design process is about people and how they come together to determine what should be the finished target. This position or characterization is confirmed by the actions of at least two of the BIG PLM vendors, PTC and DS. PTC has determined people need a new system during the Design process and has released Windchill Product Point and DS has invested millions into the French start-up Blue Kiwi. Both target people but have nothing in common. Both PTC and DS have taken people centric PLM action but it is very interesting to see that they are both headed in different directions. Product point starts from File based PLM and adds people based features by adopting them from MS Sharepoint and DS completely ignores the notion that there are Files and has focused on People and Profiles. Same target different approaches.

So is Design server by File based PLM tools or does Design require a new People Centric PLM Solution.

What is more important People centric or Process centric?  And are these mutually exclusive?  Certainly people need to be involved in a Process but what they do and how/when they interact is scripted and for this reason a Process is not People centric.  Current day PLM tools are Process centric and therefore have limited the value that can be realized by any one person.  The Process centric approach has also limited the ability of PLM to move up stream in the design process (PLM is used in the last 10% of the development process and therefore there is a market opportunity defined by the remaining 90%).  If you simplify the development process into three segments – Design, Release and Manufacture you can say Design is People centric with Release and Manufacture being very Process centric.  Can a People centric solution be Process centric and can a Process centric tool be People centric?  Could we imagine deep in the labs of Twitter there is a group of people building a workflow add-in?  And what about Facebook, will we have workflow engines and configurators that we use to manage our friends?  Imagine a Facebook application that allows you to maintain people you dislike and if any of your friends friend one of your dislikes then they are defriended (actually not a bad idea!).  The new marketing platform of Social Product Development or Socially enabled PLM is tearing at the debate of People versus Process. 

People centric solutions improve our ability to connect and communicate to others within a “Context” that is interesting or important to us.  People centric must be evaluated from two fronts, first expansion of the people we might want to connect with (Discovery) and second improved connection (Communication).  With respect to time-to-market I struggle to see the value of Discovery.I know who is on my team and how they contribute – Do I or will I really be able to Discover people in my organization that will provide value to what I am doing?  On the flip side time-to-market can be improved through improved Communication - Keeping people on the same page is the number one issue or pain point within a product development project!  Sit in any team meeting and you will hear “I wish I knew you had done that” or some variation on this sentence.  There is just so much going on… and everything is so interconnected…  Parametric, Feature based and Associative CAD improved time-to-market by improving the way change is distributed across the geometric dimension of the product.  In its essence it reduced the need to communicate or automated the communication.

While it might never be clear what came first, it is clear that the egg is Process centric and the chicken is akin to People centric.  Like herding kittens, have you ever tried to force a chicken into a Process?  The only thing you have going for you is the herd mentality of a chicken or the fact the chicken will act stupidly (stupidly is now a learning phrase)… Like people the chicken is not interested in Process.  People like chickens do not want to become a cog in a machine, they want to think and act versus being scripted.  Going back to Design, Release and Manufacture I would challenge the objective of Release and Manufacture is to script these and the objective of design is to act and think.  So can a system that forces you into a script also be a system that improves your ability to think, act and communicate and hence your improve your time-to-market?

Oleg touched on a subject that seemed to strike at the hart – he questioned the value and opportunity for PLM to be “Open Sourced“.  After re reading the post and all the comments I was struck by the fact that NO ONE asked the question or re phrased the question relative to the PLM companies and current solutions just becoming more open.  All the obvious items were discussed, it could reduce sales cost (which I doubt), anyone could contribute, solution cost would be less and the ROI would be better.  What I see missing in all this is the simple fact that that the customer would get more value out of current solutions if they were actaully open!  I know everyone will say the current tools are open, but they would be answering from a technology point of view not an agreement point of view.  Certainly if you are allowed to get a “license” then you could develop something or customize the current PLM tools.  But the process to become licensed could not be an more CLOSED if you put a committee to work with this as their objective.  A big part of the value of open source has to do with the fact that I do not need to ask you to modify or customize your code.  I am OPEN to do it, when I want and to the extent that I want!  The simple idea of allowing people access to your APIs will have a major impact on PLM success.  Therefore I think the question needs to be re stated as “Is there a value in PLM being open” and drop the idea that PLM needs to be open source.  PLM can not be open sourced!  The PLM market is just to small for an open source approach… there are not armies of people who will care to contribute… 

But imagine if PLM did become open, it would align with newest PLM marketing platform Social Media, or in the case of PTC Social Product Development.  If something is social is it open?  In order to be social does the solution need to be open?  What do people think – does a solution need to be open to be social?  Another aspect of social and something Oleg has written about multiple times is the fact that social solutions or WEB 2.0 solutions are mashable.  So again can a solution be considered social if it cannot be mashed? 

To think about this from another aspect look at the social media solutions that have become market worthy!  If you take a the cream of these off the top and look at the twinkle we call twitter, facebook and myspace you see that none of these are open source, but they are all OPEN!  And each has an open source competitive version that struggles to be successful…  I would conclude that open source is not the right question and that by dropping source from the question and focusing on open you are then on the right track.