It's pretty repeatable. February I basically go into a black hole of internal meetings, sales meetings, partner meetings with little or nothing to blog about regarding those events. But I did have an interesting set of meetings over the last couple of days. I won't bore you with the details, but one thing came out of the meetings that I of course knew all along, but seemed to be a bit of a discovery with those on the other side of the table. Autodesk Vault contains the keys to the kingdom.
Think about it, a secure and coordinated exchange of your intellectual property via a Single Source of Truth is the most desirable way of distributing the most recent / approved engineering data. Ask yourself, if you aren't using Vault, how you are distributing data today? Pack and go is great and all that but how much time do you spend pushing data out from your desk. An email here, a move to a file share there, yet another print to the welder because he accidentally lit your last print on fire. It's all Muri. Waste.
It never fails to amaze me the amount of accepted process waste is expected - not just accepted, almost expected out of engineering. Yet if you take that same amount of wasted process or procedure into the manufacturing floor you would get thrown out of the building. How many of you are taking Kaizen principles into the engineering workspace? Check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen then come back.
Eliminates overly hard work. That's they key take away for me, and if technology can be brought in to facilitate that, it makes entirely too much sense. But here's the rub, and I'm just as guilty of this as those not using Vault today - you and I (the CAD user) are the biggest opponents to Vault. Did you hear that? That was the Vault team punching me in the face. But, from my perspective at least its true. Why? Because it makes us do the right thing. Even though it is probably the least obtrusive EDM tool available, it makes us follow a process. As much as we all like to think that we are process oriented - if we don't see the long term benefit during our daily activities of creating designs and the hundreds of files that go along with it, its just easy to "get it done" and deal with the file management consequences.
Admission is the first step guys. Hi, my name is Rob and I am lazy about how I manage my design files. And yes, I've lost a few files along the way - good ones too, strong, loyal, amazing files all lost due to my negligence. No more I say! (this is the point in the blog where music begins to play in the background)
I will acknowledge that the downstream benefits far outweigh the two extra clicks to check in a file!
I know the benefits of filling out my iProperties and how that helps purchasing pull the BOM information from Vault so that they don't have to manually put in the information into the ERP system.
And I hereby pledge to put all of the design decisions into the change order form so that everyone knows the impact of the change, the decisions that lead to it, and why I just saved my company a boat load of money!
Can I get a witness!!!?
-Rob
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