Posts Tagged Social PLM
Testing 1-2-3
Posted by Alex Neihaus in CAD, Enterprise Social System, PLM on September 2, 2010
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.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a web page by any other name would smell as sweet”
Posted by Chris Williams in BOM, Enterprise Social System, PLM, Vuuch Feature, Work Instructions on September 2, 2010
The well-known musings of Shakespeare’s Juliet suggest that the names we ascribe to objects entail an element of arbitrariness. She implies that the name given to an object is a mere matter of convention. A name – Juliet explains – does not change or describe an object or its qualities… A rose is a rose because we agree to call it so, and if we agreed to call it by any other name, all that makes a rose will continue; albeit under a different name.
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.
PLM vendors to users: Let’s collaborate like it’s 1995
Posted by Alex Neihaus in Enterprise Social System, PLM, Social Media on August 31, 2010
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?
Vuuch: “We don’t see any thing else like it..”
Posted by Alex Neihaus in CAD, Enterprise Social System, PLM on August 24, 2010
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.
Attention CAD/PLM users: join the 2.5%
Posted by Alex Neihaus in CAD, Enterprise Social System, PLM on August 19, 2010
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.
Enterprise Road Kill
Posted by Chris Williams in Enterprise Social System, PLM, Social Media on August 17, 2010
Ever since the consumer embrace of social networking applications there has been a land grab to take social into the enterprise. But guess what the consumer model CAN NOT work in the enterprise!
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.
Follow A Friend Makes No Sense
Posted by Chris Williams in PLM, Social Media, Vuuch Release on February 12, 2010
I have been thinking a lot about Facebook and other social tools lately. Mostly due to the fact that we used Facebook as a framework or analogy for the new release of Vuuch. As you all know we decided to make Vuuch public even before we had a working product. The idea behind this is we truly wanted to elicit feedback from users. Working with different types of teams and our prior release we discovered a number of user experience issues that we wanted to address in the new release. You can boil all of this down to two items, user habit and value of a consolidated view of what is going on. User habit is a tough nut and Outlook seems to be like crack cocaine or cigarettes. You know you shouldn’t but you just cannot help it… With respect to a consolidated view our beta users never really realized that when they created a discussion in their SolidWorks file Vuuch created a WEB page that represented this SolidWorks file. Armed with this data and filled to the brim with the caffeine needed to sit and watch how users worked, the product management team set off to twizzel a new plan.
We centered in on the idea that we needed to enforce the notion of the WEB page Vuuch creates when you Vuuch enable something. I must admit that we came to this conclusion working with a buddy that has the best job of all. He is a marketing VP for the largest domestic beer company in the US. Unlike us engineering types he spends his day trying to figure out how to make a bottle of beer and a bikini look good next to each other. Which really isn’t that hard… It struck us that Facebook was the right analogy. When you Facebook someone you are focused in on a specific person and anyone who might also care can see what is going on. In Vuuch rather than representing people we represent what people are working on.
Our next issue was Outlook and that ugly thing we call habit. Well instead of tilting windmills we jumped on the bandwagon and created an Outlook add-in. So if you are stuck in Outlook and cannot kick the habit you are safe with Vuuch. I must say the Buzz has been more than Google. The users that have tried the Outlook add-in do something very simple. They smile and say cool.
If you want to see these two things in action checkout the 60 second video http://www.vuuch.com/media/quick_outlook_demo.wmv.
Let me close by tying back to the title of this post. Social media or social network applications that are used in our personal lives revolve around the idea that you follow people. Many companies have taken this idea and built systems that target the enterprise. Well this is a great example of why linear thinking is easy and wrong. Following a friend makes perfect sense but following a colleague is going to do nothing but generate tons of noise. Think about the guy in the next cubical that work very closely with. Well even though you work together the majority of what they do does not affect you. If they are working on 100 items do you really care about each of these? No I think not, even if you are involved with each of them, which is most likely not the case. In an enterprise setting the value of following a person is much lower than the value of following a deliverable. Al la Facebook for files. Follow the files you care about and OH ya guess what when you have nothing going with that file Vuuch no longer pings your inbox.
Do Opposites Attract in Business Process?
Posted by Chris Williams in PLM, Uncategorized on September 3, 2009
I was reading a comment made by Alan Taracuk about ERP versus PLM relative to business process (PLMTWINE post). And it got me thinking about opposites and how they do or do not attract when it comes to business procedures.
We have all heard the saying that “opposites attract”. In science we know this to be true and by looking at people we know we see this is true in life. But is this really true when it comes to business process? Does a person who loves process and procedure also make a great designer? Does the industrial designer that knows the right shape and color make the best release manager? And what about the Design process, does it really have much in common with the Release or Manufacturing?
A few weeks back I introduced the notion that there is a new market space called “People Centric PLM” and from the comments and follow on blog posts I would say there was a high level of agreement with this position. So can a highly unstructured and collaborative process of Design mix well and be attractive to the highly structured and process oriented stages of Release and Manufacture? While this might work in the dating world I wonder how this will work with respect to software applications… Lets first look at something simple – what solution owns the BOM (Bill of Material)? And while thinking about the BOM lets also evaluate when there is a viable BOM. For example while in the Design phase is there a true BOM or BOM like things used to just manage the project? In my experience the Design BOM is more about project management and never really gets transferred anywhere and in many cases is maintained in Excel (more like a parts list). But when you get to the Release stage the BOM is something of substance and after being defined in the PLM tool it is transferred to ERP. This being true it is easy to imagine many people never bother with the BOM in PLM and just enter it directly into the ERP system. So maybe “opposites attract” is true due to there being a symbiotic relationship and those that are alike end in a turf war.
I don’t know what do you guys think?
ERP Will Dominate PLM, Or Will It?
Posted by Chris Williams in Uncategorized on September 2, 2009
ERP is the largest single solution deployed within our target customers. This is true if you look at the monies spent by the customer or the number of transactions the system performs on any given day or the number of people that touch the solution within the customer. Some would say the one thing ERP has not touched is Engineering or the Product Development process… In MHO I would say this is wishful thinking. Certainly the average engineer or designer uses ERP through out the development process. They get their part number from the ERP, they check the cost of parts in ERP and they might determine where used for a component they are looking to add to their new design or inventory levels for this component. And certainly they would use ERP to create a purchase order for that prototype they need. So with all this Engineering based use of ERP, why did PLM tools ever get a chance and does the ERP vendor have a master plan for Enterprise domination?
For me PLM was PDM growing up and expanding on the basic feature of CAD file management which is certainly something better left to the CAD vendors than the ERP vendor. In the early days of PLM I would bet ERP vendors almost didn’t know these CAD files existed or at least didn’t care because the official release was being done in ERP and no one really cared about these files or what happened prior since the ERP system ended up owning the product definition. I expect what got the attention of the ERP vendors is the fact that customers started to release products in another tool, PLM. Soon after this ERP vendors had “marketing” around the fact they could be the PLM provider. Certainly this makes sense for release management because right after you release your new product with your PLM tool you transfer this information to your ERP solution (PLM vendors even have integration solutions for connecting ERP and PLM, but ERP do not push the reverse)! The real struggle/hurdle for the ERP system is CAD file management – how to manage all those complex and inter-related CAD files… I would bet that the ERP vendor has no real interest in CAD file management nor do they see this as a threat. But I am sure that the ERP vendor sees the PLM vendors as a threat every time the PLM vendors gain success with customers around product management features or when PLM captures and manages data about the product.
So we can be assured that as PLM tools do more than CAD based PDM, ERP vendors will fund “Domination” plans that ultimately remove the need to have a separate PLM tool!
In a previous post People or Process Another Chicken and Egg I simplified the product development process into Design, Release and Manufacture and in another post People Centric PLM – A New PLM Age Is BornI defined a new market segment which I call People Centric PLM. My morning coffee thoughts, that is once I got thinking about work versus last weeks vacation to South Africa:
- Is there some evil master mind in the bowls of the ERP vendors lair plotting to even simplify my simplified definition?
- Could ERP vendors reduce my simple three to just two?
- Could the product development process be simplified to just Design and Manufacture?
- Could release just become a simple transaction that is part of what the Manufacturing system does (maybe it already is…)?
Making PLM Social
Posted by Chris Williams in PLM, Social Media on December 30, 2008
I’m writing this in response to Oleg’s post on the same topic. He states Social Media applications have revolutionized the way people interact, and poses the question “what about PLM”. He goes on to say the consumer revolution is about content and therefore the Socialization of PLM will also be about user generated content…
His mistake is to say that very few people in the Enterprise can handle CAD and Product Structure. While it may be true that very few can authour CAD, it is not accurate to say everyone else does not understand the result of CAD. The CAD output is a representation of the product, which is exactly what the Enterprise is working to define and deliver. The same is true about Product Structure. While not everyone in Enterprise authours a Product Structure, they certainly understand the concept and certainly use it as a navigational aid. Definitions of the Product in either 3D, 2D or as a Product Structure are all user generated content that makes sense to anyone involved through out the Product Lifecycle.
Yes content is king, but it is not as simple as user generated content. You must question why content is king and why content connects people. So lets explore a bit further the connections in a Social Media application. If I post a picture on Flickr, it has no affect on the masses. The Social engine takes off when people with a common interest, or an interest in the theme of the picture, find the picture and take an interest in this picture. If your picture is about Gothic architecture and I am looking for information on Trees, I will never connect to you through this picture. I would conclude that the connections are made through a common interest and people’s ability to engage as they see fit.
The content is a representation or proxy of a common interest, or something that “potentially” binds us!
This concept carries over perfectly to product development and to CAD and Product Structure. A CAD file is a proxy or representation of a part/component within the product. This can also be true for excel files, word files and email discussion about the part. For example an email discussion about the cost of the part that also contains a cost calculation excel file, are representations of a part. These representation connect people within a context, cost of the part. If I have an interest in cost then I may engage this content, either through search, RSS or just by navigating back to the location of this content. Cost is not as simple as a value maintained in a database. Cost represents an ongoing exchange, debate, negotiation and compromise among the extended team. If you wish to understand how the ending value was defined you must understand all the exchanges between people with a point-of-view.
You can continue the above cost example for any other attribute about the product. The same story would hold true for color of the paint, material selection and product features. I would conclude that the product development process is already Social. What needs improvement, or to become more Social capable are the tools used actively through out the day.
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