Manufacturing, blinders and new hope

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.