This is among the easiest posts I’ve ever written because it’s absolutely content-free. (And, yes, I can almost hear some of you thinking, “Isn’t that usually the case?” — Go ahead — kid me all you like…we dish it out, so we gotta be able to take it.)

The purpose of this post is to test a new WordPress plugin from the amazing alexking.org site that will automagically tweet our posts with hashtags.

So, as they say in programming terms…move along, there’s nothing here. I can, however, recommend Chris’s thoughtful discussion of referencing in Vuuch. And you might also enjoy my post from earlier this week on “collabaoration” in PLM.

Thank you for your blog-reading-time…and we now return you to our regularly scheduled propaganda.

Well what is a web page?  The Wikipedia page starts with a detailed technical description of a web page, but reading further you discover a web page is document that describes something and like any document that describes something it is written by someone that values the content and read by those that also value the content.  Therefore a web page “represents” something, a topic, a deliverable or content that a group cares about.  Following this idea of ”represent”  and thinking about product development and PLM it makes sense to have a web page for each component in a product.  And thinking about social you could say the web page is the start of a people centric PLM solution or that the page could enable social product development.

“Representation” is a core concept in www.Vuuch.com.  In Vuuch, web pages are created for things a team is trying to deliver.  For example a product development team is working on a CAD file and they want to track what is happening with this file.  To do this they would Vuuch the file, which creates a web page that represents it and tracks everything and everyone involved.  In Vuuch a page “represents” something important to the team.  At the most generic level a page is just a page, “representing” a group or collection important to the team, a simple list.  Moving beyond the Vuuch generic web page are file pages, which are web pages that “represent” the files the team is working on as part of a project.  These could be CAD files, specifications in Word, budgets in Excel or presentations in PowerPoint, to name just a few.  Vuuch does not stop with files.  A Vuuch page can represent anything, meaning the team could use Vuuch to represent data in an ERP or CRM system.  Imagine the case where a compliant has been logged in CRM that a group of people must track and resolve.  Or the case where a PO in ERP has a handful issues that need resolution…  In both cases using Vuuch a group of people can come together and resolve the situation.  In the first case the team would use a “customer complaint” page and in the second case they might use a “PO” page type.  And hey how about an “ECO” page?

A page by any other name would smell so sweet…  Well you asked for it and it is now available.  New in Vuuch is the ability to create user defined page types.  OK you might be thinking well what would I do with these?  How about a page that “represents” your part or a page that “represents” an assembly task or assembly station http://blog.vuuch.com/plm/assmebly-instructions-in-excel/2010/08/19.  Or maybe you would like a page that “represents” a factory and has related pages for each assembly line.  Sit back and think about all the things you and your team are working to deliver and you will have a nice list of custom Vuuch page types.  Looking at this list I expect you are then thinking well how would I manage and organize all these?  Well how about a BOM?  Yes a BOM.  And don’t worry I am not going to tell you that you need a single central BOM http://beyondplm.com/2010/09/02/not-linear-bom-perspectives/, or that you need a CAD or Engineering BOM http://www.razorleaf.com/2010/08/bom-an-enovia-v6-perspective/.  In Vuuch you organize pages the way you organize folders on your PC, you decide.

Lately, the buzz surrounding social technology and product development has reached a fever pitch. Three recent posts with different, but intersecting, points of view have me thinking that unless we break out of the same old ways of thinking, nobody — save the incumbents selling the same old stuff — will benefit from a major shift in the way product development teams can work together.

Our friend Oleg has blogged about what he says are the five questions you should ask your PLM vendor about “collaboration.” Deelip Menezes has written about what he calls the “diminishing significance” of PLM. And bloggers at PTC continue to try to misdirect attention from their real agenda (a mother-of-all-heavyweight-social-platforms-on-SharePoint called “SocialLink“) with chirpy rehashes of  a 2004 book called The Wisdom of Crowds. (Actually, a high-performance product development team would act more like the experts described in Malcom Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink than like the crowd of lemmings PTC envisions. But I digress.)

The common thread that runs through all three of these blog posts? Revolutionizing the way product development teams work simply has to be a technology platform that’s big — something really heavy — something based on PLM.

Oleg simply assumes that social technology — what he calls “collaboration” — is part of a PLM environment. So, Oleg wants to help by positing questions you might ask a vendor of something so heavy.

Deelip muses the PLM acronym might be disappearing…but doesn’t seem to catch the irony that changing the name (or smashing together resellers) doesn’t fundamentally change the technology in any way. Just check out the “unified theory of gravity” slide in Deelip’s post showing layers — and layers — and layers — of PLM-or-whatever-PTC-is-calling-it-now software. That vision sure ain’t no simplification when it comes to expanding PLM to users across the enterprise. And expansion is key to changing the product development process.

And PTC…well, you know what they think. They have to argue that social technology is just another function on their platform — or they risk losing upsell opportunities to current customers. Because marketing, sales, suppliers, partners, finance — just about anyone outside engineering — isn’t interested in PLM.

All of this is so 1995. Check out the Lotus Notes ad image at the top of this post. This ad was making the case for the Notes “platform” for, I think, release 4.6. This was around the time Microsoft — which hadn’t released Exchange yet — began eating our lunch with a simple message: “What you really want is email. This collaboration stuff is too big, too complex for mere mortals. And when you do need ‘collaboration’ — whatever that is — we’ll be there with something you can use via a wizard in Exchange.” (Actually, they waited to copy Lotus QuickPlace in SharePoint…but you get the idea.)

What did we do at Lotus? We were the incumbent, believe it or not. We had thought-leadership. People looked to us to come up the solution for collaboration. So, we came up with an ad showing someone with so many “capabilities” he’s got hands coming out of his head. To put it mildly, nobody wants to be this guy. Least of all the teams across the enterprise we envisioned collaborating with our platform.

Notes was great. I loved Notes (still do, actually). But we killed ourselves by making collaboration too big and complex. Microsoft emphasized what people could actually adopt — and in doing so, toppled Notes.

Any of this sound familiar? Isn’t it interesting how Siemens, PTC and DS look and sound like Lotus did? And (I really relish this comparison) doesn’t Vuuch sound a lot more like the that’s-what-I-really-want alternative Microsoft was pitching?

Vuuch has learned the lessons of being overweight and corrected for them in our enterprise social system. Vuuch is not a layer on a PLM platform. We know that can never work and is simply convenient for PLM vendors. Vuuch is not a “collaboration link” to something so massive you have to know what five questions to ask before you can even think about using it on a product development project.

Instead, Vuuch is a system with manufacturing “DNA” that connects people through deliverables so they don’t have to think about how to work together…they can just do it.

So, the question for product development teams is simple: are you going to party like it’s 1995 (sorry, Prince) when it comes to using social technology?

Randall Newton has republished a interview with Chris from last fall. Randall commented then that Vuuch “…does add value to the product development lifecycle, so it fits in PLM.” This time, Randall notes Vuuch is “feisty.” We are enormously flattered by both Randall’s original and updated comments. To achieve the change in PLM and CAD that we believe the industry is ready for, Vuuch needs to be both unique and aggressive. PLM users seeking better product development workflow can count on us for both.

Now, about the map you see above. Chris is on vacation somewhere in Kenya…and I am in the office…thinking feisty thoughts and remembering the night I stayed at the Narok Travel Lodge (“A” on the map) before taking the road to the Maasai Mara reserve. Unlike many American tourists, my traveling companion and I weren’t flying from park to park. We had rented an SUV in Nairobi, loaded it up with spare tires (which we popped daily) and were driving by ourselves through the Kenyan countryside. We were crazy…flat out insane.

So, what does all this have to do with Vuuch? Simple: by refusing to take the conventional road in Kenya, we learned and saw and experienced things that many tourists never see or experience.  (One day, I’ll tell you the story of how we convinced armed villagers not to shoot us by distracting them with Led Zeppelin songs. No kidding. You should see me cry when I hear Communication Breakdown.)

When Randall is talking about Vuuch being feisty, it’s because he knows that Vuuch isn’t going to “fly over” the issues in making the product development process better or gloss over the fact that PLM hasn’t really changed all that much in the way development teams work together. Randall knows that he can count on Vuuch for the much more authentic overland journey, at the end of which is real change and improvement for PLM users.

As the story goes… I was speaking to the manufacturing engineer that manages the assembly line and I got the feeling they were like a one armed paper hanger, that is when I could hear them over all the grinding going on (reminded me of those old notes I use to put on drawing FTF – File to fit).  From my days at Seemage and then Dassault Systemes I learn to love the work instructions discussion.  PLM and especially Dassault Systemes have delivered Work Instructions planning and management through Delmia/PLM, yet in many places Excel previals.  This manufacturing engineer is also a 3DVIA Composer user (al la Seemage) and like their design engineer counter part they share in the value of keep it simple.  I expect if there was endless time, money and huge monitors assembly plants would be completely planned, debugged and built first virtually and then turned on to pump out product with no issues and at standard cost.  But of course this manufacturing engineer lives in the real world so life is all about building product and managing line problems in reality and in real-time versus in virtual reality.

OK so why and how would Vuuch ever fit into this use case?  Well this is why I was so excited, it is like a hand in glove fit.  For each assembly task on the line you create a Vuuch page (use the basic page, today called a placeholder).  Now you have a web page that will track everything and anything you want to track about each assembly step.  Put notes about the task on it’s page, track issues about the task or define links to supporting information (even a link to 3DVIA content).  And don’t worry, when we did this live today with the customer over a go-to-meeting it only took 5 minutes to create 150 steps (the assembly steps used in the first 4 assembly stations on their line).  All we did was open their Excel file do a little reformating and import the data.  Done – 150 web pages created, completely defining each assembly step!  Next we created four Vuuch pages (we used Part Pages for this), one for each of the first four assembly stations and then navigating to each assembly station page we related the appropriate assembly task pages for each station.  Done, we now had a complete view of the assembly line defined in Vuuch.

OK so now what.  Well now when there is an issue on a specific assembly task or assembly station just navigate to the appropriate page and define the issue.  By including the appropriate participants they will see the Vuuch pages and issues that are relevant to them.  What is really cool for these people is they only see the pages they need to see and therefore do not need to navigate through tons of information.  And better yet if they are not involved in any issues they see nothing.  If there is an operations person that is responsible for three of the stations, just invite them to the pages associated with these stations and they can monitor what is going on.  Using the Vuuch add-in for Outlook anyone and everyone in the plant is instantly aware of any issues on the line, as the appropriate information is displayed to them right in Outlook – an instant manufacturing dashboard, right where they already work.  How’s that for cool?

OK you want more cool stuff?  At the end of the day when operations walks the line to see what issues they have… all they need to do is capture an issue in an email (bet they have never done this before) using thier iPhone, Blackberry or laptop and email it to their Vuuch account and the manufacturing issue list is up to date, those involved are informed and the issues are tracked with respect to the manufacturing line as defined through the Vuuch pages.

OK so you want even more cool?  Simple, relate the appropriate 3DVIA Composer models to each station and if you wanted to get really crazy display the working instructions through the appropriate Vuuch web page.

It’s nearly lunch time as I begin to write this post. And those of you who know me personally know that the “eating.dll” process is running in my head on a high-priority thread nearly all the time. The challenge of this blog post, therefore, is to somehow deliver a thoughtful comment that capitalizes on the ingestion animation above, which shows, of all things, a slice of pizza being eaten. A near-painful image so close to lunchtime.

So, instead, let’s talk about your lunch…and who might end up, as the saying goes, eating it.

I came across an article on Wikipedia describing “diffusion of innovations” or, more simply, the process by which people adopt things. Of the many fascinating ideas in this article, one of the more striking is depicted in this chart:

Innovators — a category of adopters representing 2.5% of the whole adoption “audience” — are defined as “…the first individuals to adopt an innovation. Innovators are willing to take risks…and have closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators.”

In the PLM and CAD worlds, this 2.5% is going to be the first to feast (sorry…did I mention I am hungry?) on a new wave of social technology that delivers improved time-to-market and lowered costs. They have been sated with manufacturing technology. They know that while PLM systems have been useful — and will continue to be so — adding “features” to make PLM “collaborative” will not propel adoption of PLM outside its current user base. This 2.5% understands that social technology can change the way manufacturers work, if social technology is applied directly to the the challenges manufacturers face.

Today, this 2.5% is using Vuuch.

The rest of you? Look out for this 2.5%. They will get the benefits of adopting a new product development process on their bottom lines before you do; they will be the first to realize the savings of “social PLM” in the form of a enterprise social system, namely Vuuch. (Check out Chris’s new demos of Vuuch here.).

They could end up eating your lunch by realizing the biggest gains before you do.

Isn’t your company hungry for a better way of managing your product development? Do you really think release 4325 of your CAD tools or your PLM platform is really going to satisfy your enterprise’s thirst for improved teamwork?

So, do the right thing. Be part of the 2.5%. It’s easy…it’s productive…it’s satisfying, and as we say, one should never be afraid to Vuuch.

In the consumer landscape there are entire age groups that ignore email.  This is not to say they do not message… they are just stuck on a different type of messaging, Facebook, BBM, IM and others.  The truth is we humans love messaging.  So what is it about messaging platforms and why do we use different solutions?  The teen generation is not social networking in order to deliver work, they connect to stay up with what is going on and where the next party is.  But at work we message to get something delivered.  There is a huge value difference between these groups when comparing the impact of not reading something. 

Do you read everything on your Facebook page?  Of course not.  Do you really need to read everything on your facebook page?  Of course not.  But at work we are drawn to read every email, the moment it arrives, because it might have something to do with what we are trying to get done… it might have something to do with our work and what we need to deliver.

So what about Facebook being used in a design team?  It will never work!  Jim wrote about this not to long ago http://tech-clarity.com/clarityonplm/?s=facebook.  IMHO he missed the most important issue.  Noise…  You do not read everything on your Facebook page because most of it just doesn’t matter.  Even though there is a high level of noise in consumer based social solutions every application provider that has targeted the enterprise with a social solution has used the same consumer model.  The consumer social model is simple, you follow someone, ie you friend someone.  Well can you imagine if you followed everyone you had some sort of working relationship with?  YOUR INBOX WOULD EXPLODE and you would GET NOTHING DONE! 

Enterprise social tools are going to endup road kill!  It is only a matter of time before they become the next WAVE (see death of WAVE). 

OK so why is a guy who is selling an Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing standing up and saying Enterprise Social Solutions are going to fail???  Simple.  The relationship model in Vuuch is different and the relationship model in other social tools targeting the enterprise are wrong, wrong and wrong!  Of course we have friends at work, people we have lunch with etc, but an Enterprise Social System must understand that our lunch relationships are not what we want when it comes to getting things done.  An Enterprise Social System of course is people centric but more important it is content centric.  An Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing also understands that our connections with content vary over time and that for any one piece of content a single person may have multiple connections.  For example I might be the owner of a design specification, as well as I might be involved in two discussions about it and even more I might be resolving a set of issues requiring changes to the specification. 

OK so why is a guy who is selling an Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing standing up and saying Enterprise Social Solutions are going to fail???  Simple.  Content matters!  In the enterprise people work to deliver very specific types of deliverables.  The fact that content matters is no secret, but in the enterprise people are not going to sit around and blog, record videos of meetings or podcast, they are focused on getting something done.  An Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing understands what the team is delivering, a product.  For example if a design engineer needs to complete the design of a part they are not going to blog about what they are doing or record videos of the problems they have.  That said they are going to record design issues that need to be resolved. 

OK so why not make the PLM tools social?  PLM tools cannot be social.  PLM targets structure, control and is only embraced by a small number of users.  Design issues are connected to everyone in the enterprise and cross multiple applications.  Imagine a simple design problem that connects together a purchase order, a part and people from purchasing, the vendor and engineering.  This simple problem touches the CAD and ERP systems and maybe PLM (in many cases it would not), but most certainly it connects to people who will never be a PLM user.

We’re just getting started here at Vuuch and one of the things we’re doing is thinking hard — very hard — about the manufacturing software market. What’s the size? How much do people spend on the categoy? How much value has it really delivered?

The answer to that last question is a shocker…and the data giving us indigestion is from an unimpeachable source. Consider the chart below which I created from Bureau of Economic Analysis data (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/opt/lpr/mfgbardata.txt) which shows the annual percentage productivity change in the US manufacturing sector from 1987 through 2009. (Click on the chart to display it full size)

Bottom line: we’re spending more and getting less. Sure, there was a golden age of productivity improvement in the 90′s — when modern CAD systems became prevalent. And, one could argue, there was even a second wave in the early 2000s that was the result of a wave of PLM implementations.

But in the last few years, productivity increases have fallen below the rate of the late 1980s. Yet, CIMdata estimated that PLM spending (including CAD) in 2009 was about US$25B, despite the economic crisis — and up from just $14B in 2004, when one could argue were in the “middle” of the PLM golden age.

Yes, my friends, this is good money thrown after bad. It’s a waste. It’s dumb. And who among us wants to make a bet that Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, PTC, Oracle and PTC are going to tell their price-sensitive, recession-wracked customers that release 432 of their PLM system won’t make a real difference? That more PLM, more CAD just ain’t gonna help shock the patient’s heart back into rhythm?

Chris and I have a theory: CAD and PLM never really changed the way people work together. Those technologies simply automated aspects of the product development and manufacturing process that needed automation. But once that was achieved — and productivity was boosted for a time — re-automating the same processes over and over again yields no substantive benefit. That’s what the BEA’s numbers clearly say. Once you have CAD and PLM — and have achieved the productivity they bring to things you were previously doing manually — updating them doesn’t get you more productivity. Why? Simply because CAD and PLM do what they do — and they are ill-suited to solve additional problems.

So, CAD and PLM vendors can leverage lock-in and claim incremental capabilities and it won’t make a difference in the industry’s ultimate productivity. That’s because the green field in manufacturing doesn’t lie in “extending” CAD and PLM with (largely useless) features — it lies in including CAD and PLM in tech that is focused on the entire team’s work and the team’s relationships to that work.

Vuuch believes the next frontier that can move the needle in the BEA’s analysis will require what we call an “enterprise social system.” An ESS is tech that has CAD and PLM “DNA” — that is, it completely understands manufacturing — but an ESS doesn’t “extend” CAD and PLM to new users. Instead, it links all kinds of users in the enterprise, in the ways they want to work together and, most importantly, through the things they want to work on.

If we want to stop just breaking rocks, we have to stop believing that the tech we already have is the tech that we need to improve manufacturing productivity.

It feels a little momentous (even though I know it really isn’t) that this is my first post for Vuuch.

First, let me say that it’s a pleasure to be back in the CAD and PLM worlds. I’ve missed it since the last time Chris and I worked together on Seemage (in 2006 and 2007). This community — so insular in some ways, so inventive in many others — doesn’t know how good it has it. While internally the industry pundits always say, “Nothing ever changes in CAD and PLM. Customers are especially resistant to new ideas,” you should see what it’s like in the regular IT world. There, the mighty trio of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle dominate everything and there’s no air — none whatsoever — for a nascent, revolutionary idea.

But the CAD and PLM worlds, however dominated by megavendors, do have a tradition adoption of innovative ideas from startups. And Vuuch has a killer idea that goes something like this:

Suppose that you have, like everyone else, adopted a long laundry list of manufacturing technology. You have CAD, PLM, PDM, ERP, CRM, BOM management…the list goes on and on. Ask yourself these questions: “Has all this technology really given us a competitive advantage over the competition? Even though all this tech has improved our time-to-market and reduced cost, has it really changed the cross-department workflow we use to design, create and control our product manufacturing?”

If you’re honest, the answer is probably “no.” And we’d bet that you probably tried hard to solve that problem using collaborative technologies. We’d also wager that it’s not too much of a stretch to say that warmed-over “collaborative product development” tools didn’t cut the mustard for you. So, many have put on blinders — and stuck with what worked for them: plain old CAD and PLM.

That’s a shame because one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing in the face of evidence it isn’t helping that much. Is a PLM update really going to fundamentally change the way people work? Of course not.

Enter Vuuch, a new type of technology for manufacturers — what we call an enterprise social system (ESS) — that combines what people already know (how to use social networks) with two secret sauces. First, Vuuch understands content — it knows what a part is, for example. Second, Vuuch knows that people using social technology in business need to connect through their deliverables to each other.

Vuuch ain’t your PLM vendor’s “collaborative tool”. Nor is it just “enterprise social software,” as my friend Oleg Shilovitsky has been musing about on his blog. It’s the logical (and needed) next step: a  complete system specifically created for manufacturers that finally changes the way people work together — and Vuuch does this in concert with your PLM and CAD tech.

The obvious next question — “Well, OK, but can’t I get this from my CAD and/or PLM vendor?” — is the subject of an upcoming post.

Thanks for your blog time…and I look forward to your feedback and comments.

Consumers go social and the enterprise will follow… 

Ever since our consumer love affair with social networking applications there has been a gold rush or land-grab going on in the enterprise.  But mapping the consumer model into the enterprise will not work.  To me this is common sense but if you evaluate what has been done by 99% of the enterprise social based tools you will find they have directly copied the consumer model into the enterprise. 

Why social in the enterprise?  Again I think this is common sense.  Within the enterprise people come together to get something done.  Therefore the enterprise has people connecting to get thing done and is therefore social.  Right?  You could also say that people need to communicate and therefore they are being social.  This I expect is not news to anyone since no matter where you look there is something going on with respect to the enterprise social land grab.  If you use Salesforce then you know about Chatter.  If you do a little Google you will find things like Yammer.  If you follow Cisco then you know about the solution they are bringing to market that makes your phone and router more social.  If you are a SAP user than you know about their new social solutions.  And even CAD is getting into the game with things like social product development or collaborative 3d live (how many times have we heard this one)…  No matter what you do in the enterprise you do not need to look hard to see the land-grab going on.

So is the enterprise social?  I think yes!

Does the consumer social model work in the enterprise?  Certainly not!

What do you think?