…The real problem is the CAD-based work processes to which most product development slavishly clings. Vuuch requires potential users to think outside the box about their product development methods.

We have been [...]]]> Writing about the release of Vuuch 4.5, GraphicSpeak pinpoints the real issue preventing product development teams from improving their core processes:

…The real problem is the CAD-based work processes to which most product development slavishly clings. Vuuch requires potential users to think outside the box about their product development methods.

We have been on the soapbox for some time that legacy “collaboration” solutions in which PLM systems simply bolt on SharePoint simply cannot work. Now that PTC has thrown in the towel on just such a misadventure, we believe the time for true social technology has arrived.

In a recent blog post titled “Do we really need structured workflows if we have visibility and status?” Christine Longwell writes, “One of the major objections to implementing a PLM system is that it is going to tie a creative organization into a structured workflow that can [...]]]>

In a recent blog post titled “Do we really need structured workflows if we have visibility and status?” Christine Longwell writes, “One of the major objections to implementing a PLM system is that it is going to tie a creative organization into a structured workflow that can slow down their process and ability to react.”

Computers are machines that do exactly and precisely what their programming tells them to do. They aren’t flexible; they aren’t responsive to changing conditions. Situations the developers don’t anticipate are impossible to manage using the software and, sometimes, can even crash it. This means that PLM software that attempts to automate workflow must “choose” in advance what to understand and support. It can automate only what it knows about. Its “workflow” is a simply series of pre-determined choices. To allow for the largest possible number of pre-programmed possibilities, developers model intricate cases or permit scripting of the PLM system. But at the end of the day, PLM “workflow” is like a trolley: the destination is wherever the tracks have been laid. As long as your team’s destination matches where the trolley is going — and you can stand the ride — all might be well.

Unfortunately, this is the antithesis of what teamwork is about. Teams do not work on linear paths. They go back and forth. They go sideways. They debate and diverge. They revisit decisions in light of new information or requirements. Teams, because they are collections of human beings, are infinitely flexible. They often must go “off the tracks” to solve a problem or tackle an issue. The bottom line is that trying to automate the ebb and flow of teamwork in a PLM system is fundamentally quixotic. Pre-coded PLM “workflows” and real teamwork are oil and water: they just don’t mix well.

End users intuitively understand the limitations of PLM “workflow.” They “feel in their bones” that PLM imposes limitations that will impede creativity. This unease is what Christine is talking about in her blog post. And it’s why users outside R&D steadfastly refuse to use PLM tools. So, PLM systems end up being used for what they are actually good at: “cold-storage” of the final decisions the team has made. But the “messy,”  human process of arriving at those decisions is not stored anywhere. And so the actual design intent, along with all the history of how a decision was made, is lost.

But let’s rethink the problem of using computers for teamwork: if we can’t pre-program a computer to handle the entire universe of workflows that a product team may need, what could we have a computer do for that team? What is a computer really good at that would enable teams to do what they want, how they want to do it?

It’s a shockingly simple answer: computers are good at managing lists. And how do product development teams want to manage their work? They want to list things.

Wikipedia points out that linked lists “…provide an easy implementation for several important abstract data structures…” There’s no news here. Consider your own personal life. It revolves around the power of lists. We list our to-do’s and grocery lists. We have “TV listings” and “top-ten lists” of all kinds. We list the best- and worst-dressed people. We make lists of things we want for holiday gifts. We list and list and list. And because lists are so important to us as individuals, it’s a natural, shared metaphor used by teams to manage their work. After all, nobody has to explain to a new team member what a list is and how a list works.

The intersection of lists and the power of computers to manage them doesn’t mean that we should all use Excel or Notepad all the time. Far from it. But it does mean that any software that attempts to support product development workflows must have a list metaphor at the heart of its design. Rules, steps and states…all the things PLM “workflow” says are useful for teamwork…are as unnatural as the four-armed man at the carnival. This is the obvious truth Christine has blogged about: structured workflow, as classically implemented in PLM, can never be a natural teamwork metaphor.

In a future blog post, I will explain how Vuuch enhances lists with social technology to implement a social system that works the way teams expect it to instead of demanding they change what they do.

Chad Jackson recently posted an analysis of Vuuch on his Engineering Matters blog.

For us, his title says it all: Vuuch is “a unique approach to social computing in product development.”

We are especially gratified that Chad has noted the value of using using social technology to [...]]]>

Chad Jackson recently posted an analysis of Vuuch on his Engineering Matters blog.

For us, his title says it all: Vuuch is “a unique approach to social computing in product development.”

We are especially gratified that Chad has noted the value of using using social technology to link the people in a product development effort with the deliverables that team must produce. That is, we think, the essence of an enterprise social system for manufacturing.

Vuuch 3.5 features the ability to import product structures directly from SolidWorks, new domain administration capabilities, custom page types and more.

Details are in the press release attached to this post.

We invite you to join us for our weekly Vuuch overview, presented every Tuesday at [...]]]> We are very pleased to announce Vuuch 3.5 today.

Vuuch 3.5 features the ability to import product structures directly from SolidWorks, new domain administration capabilities, custom page types and more.

Details are in the press release attached to this post.

We invite you to join us for our weekly Vuuch overview, presented every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT. Register at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

If you’ve attended one of our weekly webinars (you can sign up here to join us any Tuesday), you know that we bristle at the mention of Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative extension to PLM. We believe SharePoint is perfect if you want to add complexity to [...]]]>

If you’ve attended one of our weekly webinars (you can sign up here to join us any Tuesday), you know that we bristle at the mention of Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative extension to PLM. We believe SharePoint is perfect if you want to add complexity to PLM. It’s a good thing if you want your team to spend more time on configuration than on working together. Select SharePoint if you believe people and teams should conform to the software rather than the other way around.

Still, because of Microsoft’s presence in the marketplace, lots of PLM purists (who believe PLM could succeed “if only people will change the way they work”) talk about SharePoint a lot. Oleg Shilovitsky, one of our favorite PLM bloggers, has just published a post pointing out that despite PTC’s (and others’) embrace of SharePoint, the shine is wearing off.

How about we skip surveys and go right to the source to see if SharePoint and manufacturing are a match? Let’s start with the 106-page “SharePoint 2010 Walkthrough Guide,” which can be downloaded here. Believe it or not, the fictional company in this marketing collateral is a manufacturing company. That’s perfect. What better way to see if SharePoint can actually promote better PLM collaboration? Maybe SharePoint will have our team up and running fast, collaborating to improve products.

First, the document sets the stage:

…Contoso is a fictional manufacturing company that produces gears for other industries that rely on gears in their products. You will be playing the role of Erika Cheley, who is a project manager at Contoso. She has just assumed the role of Project Manager for one of the projects that focuses on improving the production process for the manufacturing of the Great White Gear product. Throughout this walkthrough she will be configuring the site that she will be using to work with her project team. We will start the initial walkthrough as Erika makes some design changes to her site.

“Makes some design changes to her site?” Why do I want to start there? Why do I need to design a site before I can do anything with it? But wait, that’s not really the first task.

First, Erika has to create “the team site that will be used to manage her project” (page 5). Whoa! Wait a minute…before I design the site…I have to create it? Sounds like I need an IT guy.

But even creating the site…and making design changes, whatever that means, doesn’t get the team going. After Erika creates the site, she has to customize “the project team site to include a project description” (page 5). Doesn’t the project team already know what product it’s working on? This reminds me of what my eighth-grade English teacher used to tell me about essays: to make them good, you needed to throw away the first three paragraphs because most writers spend that time warming up. The good stuff is buried in the middle.

Yet, in Microsoft’s own documentation describing SharePoint for manufacturing, the first activity — simply describing what everyone already knows — takes nearly five pages to explain.

This is valueless work. It’s an example of what’s wrong with SharePoint for manufacturing. Every second of time spent putting knowledge we already have into some system adds to the cost of the product and slows down time-to-market. This is classic IT for IT’s sake. And it’s the reason the team won’t use it. It requires so much effort to simply get started, only die-hard PLMers will ever use it. That means you can forget ever getting finance people, marketing people, vendors and partners to use it.

Still, Erika doesn’t give up. She decides on page 11 that “she would like the site to reflect the Contoso brand and provide a graphical representation of product data…” OK. We’re about 10% into the walkthrough based on page count and so far we have had to create the site, describe it and now, duplicate the CAD data stored in the PLM system. Sorry, I am just not feeling it.

The graphics setup goes on to about page 17 — including creating a Silverlight “web part,” the function of which in the scenario escapes me — and would probably escape the team as well. Have we gotten to any collaboration on the gear part yet? Not quite.

It seems that while Erika is “very pleased with the changes made to the site” she still wants more setup. So, starting at page 17, Erika decides to change the site theme. This, including a “media web part” (wouldn’t 3DVIA Composer be so much simpler?) goes on to page 25.

OK, now that we’ve spent about 25% of our time just getting ready to do something, are we there yet? Are we ready to friend people to something the team cares about? Can we use Outlook and SolidWorks and Inventor to discuss problems, assign tasks and track issues? (These are things you can do in Vuuch from the start.)

Well, not quite…

Now that Erika has spent some time designing her site, she is ready to move on to the creation of content for her team site. She has a few specific things she would like to configure, including a custom order tracking solution, some document library configurations, and some workflows.

We’ve spent nearly 30 pages in this document setting up libraries and workflows (why anyone wants a collaboration workflow is beyond comprehension. Collaboration is, by definition, non-modal and and non-linear).

And we are still nowhere near being able to use the site for anything approximating collaboration. The document goes on and on and on with more configuration…more setup…more customization. We never quite seem to get to the actual teamwork.

I’ll spare you the rest. But you can see for yourself. No matter how hard its marketing people try, SharePoint isn’t about collaboration or improving teamwork in manufacturing. SharePoint is simply about glomming more “platform” onto already overweight PLM systems. That suits PLM vendors…not customers.

The result? End users avoid it like the plague, manufacturing IT people can’t understand why users “just don’t get it” and the wheel just spins.

As any good netizen knows, you really rate when journalists live blog from your events. Yesterday, Ralph Grabowski live blogged from a Vuuch webinar. Suddenly, Vuuch is in the same league as Apple or Microsoft!

You can read the blog post here.

Ralph likes to needle vendors…except, [...]]]>

As any good netizen knows, you really rate when journalists live blog from your events. Yesterday, Ralph Grabowski live blogged from a Vuuch webinar. Suddenly, Vuuch is in the same league as Apple or Microsoft!

You can read the blog post here.

Ralph likes to needle vendors…except, it seems, Autodesk. He mentions in the post that Chris purportedly “made a mint” selling Seemage to DS. (How would he know that? I was the marketing executive for Seemage. And I don’t recall sending Ralph the cap table).

But we’ll take the gentle ribbing because Ralph is one heckuva reporter. Chris and I are amazed at the fidelity he achieved in real time while live blogging from the webinar. It’s a fabulous condensation of the demo and we appreciate Ralph taking the time to join us.

Each Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT, we present Vuuch live. We hope you can join us at your first opportunity. You can always register for the next live webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

Attached to this post are recordings of the webinar we presented on Tuesday, [...]]]>

Each Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT, we present Vuuch live. We hope you can join us at your first opportunity. You can always register for the next live webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

Attached to this post are recordings of the webinar we presented on Tuesday, September 21, 2010. The topic is Vuuch and people-centric PLM. The demonstration of Vuuch shows slightly different capabilities than we showed in last week’s webinar and so we decided to post this replay in case you want to see both demonstrations via a recording of the live webinar.

There are two attachments in this post. The content is identical; the files different only by the codec required to view them. The Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file is about 50MB; the XviD-encoded .avi is 175MB in size and has slightly better resolution.

designnews.com’s Beth Stackpole reports that “Vuuch 3.0 adds a social networking layer to traditional CAD, PLM and desktop tools like Microsoft Word and Excel…Using familiar social networking concepts like ‘friends’ and ‘status updates,’ project participants can dynamically organize and share product content across a diverse team without the [...]]]>

designnews.com’s Beth Stackpole reports that “Vuuch 3.0 adds a social networking layer to traditional CAD, PLM and desktop tools like Microsoft Word and Excel…Using familiar social networking concepts like ‘friends’ and ‘status updates,’ project participants can dynamically organize and share product content across a diverse team without the constraints of more structured PLM platforms…”

Read the entire article here.

Attached to this post is a recording of the first of our new, weekly Vuuch webinars. This webinar is an introduction to the Vuuch Enterprise Social System for Manufacturers. If you are using CAD and/or a PLM system and want to improve product development, Vuuch is for you. We [...]]]>

Attached to this post is a recording of the first of our new, weekly Vuuch webinars. This webinar is an introduction to the Vuuch Enterprise Social System for Manufacturers. If you are using CAD and/or a PLM system and want to improve product development, Vuuch is for you. We are posting this for the convenience of visitors from countries in which our regular time for the webinar is inconvenient.

We present this material live every week. We hope you will join us for one of these sessions, which are scheduled for every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT. You can register for an upcoming Vuuch webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

The two files attached are identical and vary only in size. The .avi is a DivX-encoded file and is about 340MB. The .wmv file is much smaller, about 80MB. However, it requires the GoToMeeting codec.

We believe Vuuch 3.0 is something new, something different…and most of all, something of real value to product development teams.

If you can give us an hour some Tuesday, we would appreciate the opportunity to show [...]]]> Today, we are very pleased to announce Vuuch 3.0. Details are in the press release attached to this post.

We believe Vuuch 3.0 is something new, something different…and most of all, something of real value to product development teams.

If you can give us an hour some Tuesday, we would appreciate the opportunity to show you how Vuuch revolutionizes team work in the product development process. Register for the webinar here.