Autodesk Accelerate: Customers talk PLM 360

Heard over and over in Boston’s District Hall last week: “I got a trial license of PLM 360, played with it for 6* months (although I was still doing my real job most of the time) and then started rolling out workspaces. As we got further into it, we realized what other problems PLM 360 could solve and started using the API interfaces or creating and customizing workspaces.” “We needed to put all of our information in one spot — if one person is out of the office, we need someone else to be able to fill in.” “We’re trying to figure out how to use [$25/month] Participant licenses to roll in our suppliers. Involving them in our PLM will make us much more efficient and agile.” “It comes out of the box, we just had to tweak it.” The Accelerate PLM event was the first of its kind, a special event put on by Autodesk for PLM 360 users outside of the Autodesk University framework. The venue was overflowing with PLMish types — more than 200 in total, >100 customers and prospects, and the rest media, analysts, resellers and Autodesk people and partners all furiously taking notes. It was a gamble that paid off: in a very short time, Autodesk pulled together an excellent agenda and, in the end, had to close registration because the venue simply couldn’t hold more people. Customers talked, Autodesk listened — and noted what was working and what needed tweaking, requests for new features, and how the PLM 360 implementation process could be made even smoother. Resellers listened too, learning what pain points PLM 360 was already addressing, what customers valued and what services the channel partners might offer, either to supplement the customers’ own teams or to enhance that out-of-the-box experience. The speakers weren’t your typical PLM conference types: they tended to represent smaller companies (though sometimes operated in supply chains with the biggest manufacturers on the planet). Quirky, Oyo Sports, Zep Solar, Dragon Innovation and others talked about their companies, the logic for seeking out PLM in the first place, and then, how the PLM 360 implementation was serving their business needs. All came to roughly the same conclusions, that PLM enabled them to

• speed up their new product introduction process because everyone was on the same page, had access to the latest (most correct) information
• improve product quality for many of the same reasons but also because people across the enterprise were more engaged
• beat prior levels of customer satisfaction because issues were noted, tracked and resolved, and not disappearing into an email or other holding pattern
• optimize product costs, again because of greater access to consistent information. Advanced PLM 360 users are also looking at including suppliers in their implementations and felt that this would further drive down costs while improving engagement and quality.

One breakout session, led by David Keeley of TSM Controls, showed a creative yet dead-simple way to quantify TSM’s PLM thought process. Mr. Keeley worked with senior managers to identify corporate goals such as improved internal collaboration, controlled access to product information, fewer quality problems, and growing field services revenue. He then looked at the PLM 360 workspaces and figured out how difficult it would be for TSM to implement them, from out of the box to complex because of customization or setup. By mapping the two and setting values for correlation and difficulty, Mr. Keeley comes up with a score that maps corporate goals against PLM implementation projects. He didn’t put it quite this way, but the end-result was a to-do list of PLM implementation tasks, with quick wins against the most important corporate objectives to keep momentum rolling. Genius. The Autodesk team had only two speaking slots over the day and a half of sessions. In the first, SVP Andrew Anagnost talked about the company’s view on the future of making things. He highlighted  three trends: new end-buyer expectations with respect to quality, accessibility and the intelligence of their purchases; new ways of manufacturing those products that are more agile, more connected and increasingly rely on new materials and, lastly, how product designers work to meet those two objectives. It was a refreshingly Autodesk-free presentation and concentrated mostly on what the company sees as the future world its products will have to support and enable. Brian Roepke, Director of PLM,  delivered the second Autodesk presentation, with a sneak preview of what’s coming in PLM 360. He showed off a spiffy new user interface that’s meant to work across desktop and mobile platforms and has a couple of usability improvements that set the audience to clapping. What I found most interesting, though, was the extension for CAD data vaulting: you will soon be able to vault on your network with Autodesk Vault or in the cloud with PLM 360. Your first reaction, like everyone else in the room, was probably “Wait. What? I have GIGABYTES of data. Cloud? No way.” Way. Mr. Roepke explained that Autodesk has developed something it calls Transfer Avoidance, “explained” here: Mr. Roepke showed benchmark data that showed a 25x time improvement and a >30x bandwidth usage improvement when comparing CAD data moved via Transfer Avoidance to other technologies. He says that typical users can expect a 5x to 30x improvement. Clearly, we’re going to need to know a lot more about this — but the promise is tremendous. Multi-CAD data management was also a big hit. What didn’t come up? Gnashing of teeth about the cloud. Perhaps these companies are smallish and newish enough to not have an entrenched IT department that feels threatened by commercial cloud offerings; or, at any rate, is capable of providing internal security equal to that of a commercial cloud provider. Or perhaps these people are seasoned online bankers in their personal lives and cloud simply doesn’t scare them. At any rate, cloud was a non-issue. What did come across, clearly, is that manufacturing is changing rapidly and that the companies that thrive in this new world will be adaptable, fast and flexible. Oyo Sports puts out a whole line of sports memorabilia in 2 days, from the moment the Major League Baseball All-Star team rosters are announced to the time their commemorative toys leave the manufacturing plant. A player gets traded? New figurine in the right box, shirt, logo, rights all cleared, in 2 days. Can you do that? What technology can help you get there? That’s what Accelerate was all about. — * This was an early adopter who may have had special access. I think Autodesk’s trail license period is 30 days but check with Autodesk and your reseller for the current offering. Note: Autodesk graciously covered some of the expenses associated with my participation at the event but did not in any way influence the content of this post.