Few months ago, in this post, I had chance to discuss the future of immersive CAD and Data Management. Looking on the latest DE article by Kenneth Wong, NX7 with HD3D: Where CAD Geometry and Lifecycle Data Mingle, I found it very interesting to couple it together with some of my previous thoughts. HD3D from Siemens PLM (announced month ago) and 3D Live environment from DS (introduced 2 years ago and embedded into DS V6 last year) clearly representing the answer on user’s demand related to immersive representation of data from both 3D environments like CAD system and data management system like PDM/PLM.
You can see on the next few slides and videos of 3D Live application from DS. The famous turn-table allows you to filter, search, browse and navigate on assemblies, parts and related information.
On the next few slides and video you can figure out look and feel of HD3D app from Siemens PLM. Use of visual tags helping user to snap and browse information related to 3D Models as well as filter and search data.
What I see as a set of common characteristics of this trend?
1. Use 3D as a basic user experience
2. Use Immersive 3D as an entry point to browse through product geometry and lifecycle data
3. Mashup metadata, lifecycle data and other related information
So, what is my conclusion today? Both, DS and Siemens PLM experience represents clearly customer demand to bridge 3D and non-3D information together. With some difference in marketing and product buzz around, I see an overall trend is to unified 3D and non-3D environment for advanced CAD/PLM users.
In the past, I had chance to write about Google Wave (GW). Lots of interest coming around everything related to Google Wave. You can read some of my previous posts about Google Wave to get up to speed with my way to think about Google Wave.
So, the following interesting project from SAP drove my attention during the weekend, so I decided to share my thoughts about SAP Gravity project. However, before, take a look on video produced by SAP.
From the earlier beginning of Google Wave, it was clear that we could expect an impact of Google Wave on the enterprise software world. Despite the fact enterprises are using a big amount of unique and valuable enterprise systems, all of them are heavily relying on email to collaborate. Therefore, GW offering updated email collaboration paradigm will become an attractive guest in enterprise eco-system.
So, what are my thoughts about Google Wave in the context of SAP demo project? I have to say that I’m experimenting with Google Wave too and my thoughts, of course, affected by my own experience with Google Wave.
Pros:
1. Collaboration between the unstructured communication world and structured business process definition is notable
2. Google Wave integration capabilities
3. Very powerful history representation
3. There is a huge potential for additional developments – Gadgets and Robots
Cons:
1. Keep of track of all your Waves is as complicated as emails- no big surprise in this space.
2. The way Google Wave will manage store of integrated information is not clear (i.e. BPMN for SAP Gravity, but future thinking about 3D models etc.)
3. Wave to Wave merges and communication can create additional complexity.
What is the future perspective for Google Wave in PLM space in my view? The most perspective direction is collaboration around 3D and other design-related situational collaboration. This is space that today occupied by mail. This is not an empty space – innovative products like 3DLive as well as other CAD / Viewers -related products are also targeting this space. However, I see a potential to embed live 3D model or drawing into Wave and provide an ability to participants to collaborate, similar to how BPMN process was created by SAP Gravity.
I would be interested to hear your opinion and thoughts.
Best, Oleg
I’d like to share some thoughts related to processes. There is a clear, ability to manage processes is very important. However, user adoption is very important. I know lots of systems that once implemented never been used or been used by a fraction of the people in the organization. So, when I’m looking on how Social Tools and other Enterprise 2.0 -like tools getting their path into the organization, I think this is something that can improve collaboration and process adoption rate.
I was thinking about micro-blogging services such as Twitter or Yammer. I had chance to post about that before. If you just get on plmtwine, you can take a look on the following posts:
What drove me to think about it again? I was looking on Twitter Retweet project and thinking that this is a good example of how process interface can be implemented in microblogging. On the back-end it can be connected to any process tools you want. However, providing such process experience to the people may take it very much forward in organization. Instead of getting to complex enterprise systems people will be twitting their processes. Remember, simple wins all the time!
Below you can see some pictures from Twitter retwitt project (thanks mashable for pics).
Have you ever thought how important is speed of the process? Thinking about a potential implications of change process speed-up, I got to the conclusion that this can be a very good idea. I will try to explain why. Think about typical change you are making in the product you currently designing and/manufacturing. I’ll try to simulate questions you need to ask yourself and your colleagues to brainstorm and discover to unlock potential of process speed-up.
1. How fast/slow is “the typical change process” in your organization?–> About 20 days
2. How many hours you need to really proceed with this change? –> Abut 4-5 hours
3. How fast process should be in your view? –> 2-3 days
4. What your organization is doing during 18 day left? –> Queue….
This is sounds like obvious, right? However, let’s continue with additional questions that will help you understand what happens in your organization during 18 queuing days.
1. Your suppliers are doing work that probably needs to be returned, reworked or scrapped
2. Your manufacturing facility is making product that needs to be reworked or scrapped
3. Your assembly and test facility is doing unnecessarily tests
4. Your production line down or potentially down for extra 18 days
5. Your organization is shipping product that potentially needs to be fixed or factory returned
6. Your customer is probably waiting extra 18 days.
Now try to calculate worth of all this topic I just mentioned for your organization. I’m sure you got a very good number to justify your tomorrow’s thinking about why your PLM system is still not managing the overall change process in you organization.
So, what is the conclusion? You need to speed up processes. Period.This is the main role of PLM system that connects organizational dots and makes life blood of your organization to move faster. I’d be very interested to hear about your (or your customer’s) experience.
You probably wonder – GPS, PLM, BIM… What do they have in common today? In my view, the common is their relationship with real objects of a physical world around us. GPS can position us and give us a direction in surrounding world, CAD/PLM is the universal mechanism to design everything, PLM and BIM respectfully are set of product and tools to organize processes around product design, manufacturing, building etc.
For years engineering and building systems like CAD, PLM, BIM was completely disconnected from a real world. I always had the feeling of separation. This is like a wall between engineering and rest of the company. You (engineers) can use any systems you want, design and plan whatever you want… The real things will be disconnected from this virtual engineering world. Not anymore in my view. Few announcements and publications drove me to think about future leapfrog in this space.
Google’s announced first Droid phone with Google Navigation System. You will ask me how it related to PLM? Not as much, for the moment. However, thinking in deep and applying some PLMish language you can see Google providing 3D application connecting physical driving experience and virtual world model based on Google Maps.
Another one – Google SketchUp. On the surface, there is nothing special. I used to hear from many engineers their opinion about this product as a toy, far from “Real CAD” systems. Slow down, please. Keep your engineering ego for the future. Google is using SketchUp to re-create the world in 3D on top of Google Map. Google 3D Warehouse is a very good example of building blocks in this 3D universe. Read more in about Google Building Maker in Google official blog.
Some business thoughts. You need to see the following article: Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less than Free” business model. This is not the first time when we see the power of free products. I’m almost hearing engineers that saying – but this is not for the real enterprise world, this is on the different planet. Not anymore, in my view. Connection between real and virtual happens much faster that you can think about it.
So, conclusion for today. I’m thinking about immersive world where design, engineering and real people are all connected to dream, design, plan, build and manufacture life around us. And, in my view, this is a perfect time for today’s CAD/PLM/BIM vendors to think about a future of their products. How to catch up before Google’s next leapfrog? Just not to find themselves in place of GPS manufacturers today.
Collaboration is very important for product development including different phases – design, engineering, manufacturing etc. “Collaborative factor” is playing a very important role in development of CAD, PDM, PLM etc. I have to admit that engineering activities are very much different from areas like accounting and some others. For many years, development of capabilities to collaborate, was a very interesting and innovative factor related to development of CAD and PLM system.
However, time is moving forward together with technologies and collaboration is coming to our everyday life together with internet, mobile devices, office automation and other innovative technologies. So, everything becomes very “collaborative”. Question I want to ask today in simple way – should CAD/PLM related product think about wider adoption of collaborative capabilities coming from non-specific engineering and manufacturing world.
According to the Forrester, the following functional areas considered as primary criteria to include vendors into their research: -Collaborative workspace capabilities. This includes the ability to store and manage multiple
artifacts with the space, not just the ability to share content over a network. -Basic content management capabilities. These capabilities allow users to access a single copy of
an artifact through the network. -The ability to customize the space for specific business purposes. Personalized dashboards,
workspace templates, and workflow capability are examples of customizability. -Enterprise capabilities for security and authentication. Access-control lists (ACLs), single-
sign on through Active Directory or LDAP support, and enterprise rights management
capabilities (ERM) are some of the key components for enterprise security and authentication
offered by these vendors. -A development environment for building custom collaboration applications. The evaluated
vendors provide development options for firms with very specific internal needs or for power
users who want to self-provision custom applications.
From the standpoint of Product Lifecycle Management and Collaborative Product Development, I can see a lot of things are missing in this list to allow designers and engineers to collaborate. However, mentioned above capabilities fit very well tool. Special interest, in my view, also need to be done on the latest focus of collaborative platforms on the intersection between a content creation, traditional collaboration and social elements.
So, what is my intermediate conclusion? Collaborative platform’s evolution brings them more and more in the space of traditional product design and development collaboration. Is it relevant and make sense to marry them, or we are just talking about “yet another collaborative buzzworks”? Is there overlap in platforms and functionality provided by PLM vendors? Do you think a notion of collaboration is so different in product design and development that make appropriate to develop specific platforms?
Interesting publication came during the weekend related to the future of collaboration. According to the analytical research, 80 Per Cent of Enterprise Collaboration Platforms Will Primarily Be Based on Web 2.0 Techniques by 2013 Managing Users’ Transition from File-Orientation to Web 2.0 Approach Will Be a Major Challenge. The main point of research and/or prediction made by Gartner is related to the difference between so called – “file based” and “browser based” collaboration came mostly in wiki-style and web 2.0 like tools and future migrations between them.
I’d like to take it a bit future and analyze what implications it can provide for future collaboration in product development. On one side, most of CAD based collaboration tools are file-based. Files are remaining the most significant piece of information people are collaborating on. Files come to the collaboration in a very different way – CAD files (obvious), many CAE related ones, Excel Files with variate of information resided into these files.
On the contrary, we can see many tools that purely web based on hybrid with significant dissociation from file content. Collaborative tools in the style of Wikis, collaboration tools come out Microsoft SharePoint, various Web tools are coming more and more loudly shows their place in collaboration.
Separately, I’d like to say few words about CAD and collaboration. Tools like CATIA V6 and associated 3DLive presents a new way collaborate on single product content (mainly design, for the moment). What will happen to these tools in the future? Will it be the foundation for the future non-file collaboration tools?
So, what is my conclusion today? Collaboration tools are slowly starting to their move from the need to read “files” into the direction to focusing more on pure “content”. In my view, this move will be slow, but this is a way to go. So, may be in 2013 years we’ll see a completely new way to collaborate as it according to the Gartner prediction? Hmm… interesting.. What do you think?
This week was signed by a significant event – Dassault Systems announced intent to acquire IBM’s PLM Software distribution activities. In the shadow of this event, I was looking on various publications related to activities of big companies, acquisitions and mergers. One publication, IT leaders trust Microsoft more than Google, 2-to-1 by Jason Hiner, was very interesting. I hardly can estimate how to compare my trust in two huge public companies. My trust-measure-kit failed to designate it. Large and publicly traded companies generate feeling of trust. On the other side, we all know other examples.
However, this publication drove me to think about a very practical topic related to selection of CAD/PLM software and trust in PLM vendors. Choosing of PLM software is not a simple activity. I’ve seen many companies making this decision, and always it is a very complicated process. The nature of this complication, in my view, is that PLM activities have a very long time span. Once started with specific software, you will keep this for multiple projects and products. Even if you’ll decide to change your CAD or PLM software, it will probably reflect your future activity.
I’m not big fun of surveys, but many times selection of PLM vendors reminds me one big survey customer filling in trying to decide what software to choose. In the end, one of the final questions is the question of trust. Big PLM vendors generate feeling of trust and stability. DS and IBM with their history of relationships and trust in IBM big blue brand, Siemens PLM with their famous statement – we never let a customer fail. Do you believe in well-established PLM companies? Stable niche players? Innovative startups? Maybe you trust more in association with big service providers in this space?
These are just my thoughts. I wonder to know how do you see the notion of trust in PLM?
The new release of SolidWorks Labs Threehouse V2 hit me to think again about Top Down approach and efficient communication between Design/Engineering and Manufacturing.
Design, Engineering and Manufacturing
Problem of disconnecting between Design/Engineering organization is not new, in my view and exists in many manufacturing organizations. It’s obvious Engineers sees a product they develop very much in the light, of how they build parts/sub-assemblies/assemblies/configurations models. For them this is what make sense. However, from manufacturing side, it always looks different because their structure is driven by assembly process, packaging, supply chain and other factors from a shop floor. Most of the systems today are not providing a good solution for this problem. Those customers that made decent solution in this space built it based on huge customization and service base.
Treehouse, Modular design and Top Down
In my view, Treehouse concept is interesting since it can provide a communication bridge between two worlds: design and engineering/manufacturing. The way to initiate design top-down in SolidWorks is not trivial and Treehouse can be an interesting approach to do so. It can facilitate modular design and ability to create new products and configuration top down initiated from Engineering/Manufacturing space.
What is your opinion on that? Have you had chance to think or implement the top-down approach in your organization? What systems you had in your mind to support it?
Posted by olegshilovitsky 
Posted by olegshilovitsky 
Posted by olegshilovitsky 
