Ellipsis

The 2012 Autodesk Manufacturing Portfolio

I've been quiet for a while. Like a kid that knows a secret and those of you that know me, know how hard it is for me to keep my trap shut for this long, but finally it's here! The 2012 Autodesk Manufacturing Portfolio, including the Product Design Suite and Factory Design Suite. 

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be rolling out video demos with my take on what's new in the individual products, but in the mean time have a look at my interview with Buzz Kross and his team to get the inside look into what's new in the portfolio.

 

Cheers guys! Much more to come.

-Rob

And the Winner Is....

I'd like to spend a minute or two personally congratulating Sean Dotson and the team at RND Automation & Engineering as the Inventor of the Year for 2010. A quick copy and paste from their website and I know all about them... RND engineers, designs, manufactures and retrofits custom automation & material handing machinery for industries as diverse as hydraulic valves, automotive sensors, and contact lenses.

Just kidding of course, I've known Sean on a personal level of sorts for some time now. I was thinking about this before our Customer Appreciation and Roundtable in Chicago last year. While I've known Sean for several years, I'd not actually met the man in person until that event. We'd go round and round on Facebook over some of the social topics of the day, read about his decision to see how hard he could hit a car on his bike, and his next triathlon or some crazy thing that only the albino guy from the DaVinci Code would do to himself... seriously Sean, self-inflicted torture those marathons...[grin]

His reputation in the Autodesk community as a staunch advocate of Autodesk products was well known to me during my time at a reseller and of course in my current job here at The 'Desk. What may not be as well known in the community is that Sean is one of the most vocal when things are... well, askew if you will. I'm pretty sure he still has his menu on his Inventor UI instead of the ribbon bar. I would imagine his browser is on the right hand side of the screen for no other reason than we put it on the left by default... Sean is by no means a fanboy, he's a realist and gives it to us when he feels we deserve it with as much passion and as quickly as he is to advocate for us when he feels the product is being misrepresented.

All of that amounts to a fantastic customer. A realist when it comes to every aspect of his business. He's not Mammoth, Parker Hannifin, or Joy Mining so he wins and looses on their ability to rely on their tools of choice to be more competitive, more innovative, with a higher level of customer service. They don't have time to mess around with tools that don't work. Autodesk Inventor works for RND. And isn't that what most people want with their tools? To work consistently, without slowing you down, and your technology partner should listen to feedback as the intellectual property of your organization is developed on that software, and the feedback should be taken seriously. 

We absolutely do, and the fact that the Inventor of the Year award is voted on by the community speaks volumes to all that Sean and team have contributed to it throughout the years. Congratulations guys! See you next month to film our next OTJ!

-Rob

 

Autodesk Vault - The Keys to the Kingdom

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