Bridgestone: Digital Transformation

CARLOS CAMINOS: Welcome to Bridgestone's Digital Transformation. My name is Carlos Caminos. I've been around a bit, as you can see from my experiences. I am the Data Management Team Manager at Bridgestone Americas. My key role is coordinating and optimizing data flow from design and engineering to manufacturing. Responsibilities include implementing software solutions, providing training, and establishing efficient workflows.

I have over 25 years experience with Autodesk softwares. I am proficient across multiple tools like Fusion 360 Manage, the AEC Collections, Product Design & Manufacturing Collection, Vault Professional, and Autodesk Construction Cloud software. My expertise is in practical applications of Autodesk products within architecture, engineering construction, and manufacturing industries.

JOSH WILSON: My name is Josh Wilson. I'm the BAMM Asset Administrator at Bridgestone Americas, which means that I'm the Fusion 360 Manage Administrator. My experience is the past decade plus, I've been working in the manufacturing industry with a focus on data management solutions, specifically within the Autodesk Vault and Fusion 360 Manage applications.

CARLOS CAMINOS: So our learning objectives today-- lessons learned in our initial workflow roll-outs, streamlining workflows to create repeatability and efficiency, standardizing process for global adoption, developing the foundation for product evolution. Let me give you a quick introduction. At Bridgestone, it's crucial for us to keep up with evolving world and embrace technological advancements that can help simplify our workflows.

About a year ago, we introduced Fusion 360 Manage or F3M. And initially, we celebrate a small success before more people began engaging with the platform, leading to increased interest and migrating other processes to F3M. As a result, we've started reviewing some of our most intricate workflows and developing plans to leverage F3M's customizability and accountability features. This session will cover our current situation, lessons learned and the outlook for F3M at Bridgestone.

Current State of Manufacturing-- challenges faced in terms of process management. So for us, process management is one of the most important things. Because it's not a repetitive process right now we have different locations doing different things. In some cases, it's being documented. In other cases, it's not.

We're also an old culture. We're used to paperwork. People are having a difficult time steering away from that type of workflow. We have a lot of legacy data. And along with that, we have legacy humans. We have individuals who just want to continue to do the same thing they've been doing for years.

The importance of efficiency, quality, and compliance-- so documentation is a big thing for us. Right now, it's very poor. Documentation could exist in different plants if there was a great solution available. Another similar project that a different plant won't have visibility to it. So that reduces our quality, our efficiency, and even our compliance. We are trying now to centralize all of our data.

Need for comprehensive solution to streamline processes-- and this is probably one of the backbones to why we have F3M at our company. So we need to develop a process that's repeatable. Only when you have a repeatable process are you able to gather enough data to make decisions based on data. And repeatability will just bring efficiency.

Let's talk about the vision here a little bit. So in the next couple of slides, we'll talk about why we like Fusion 360 Manage. We'll show some of the features and capabilities. We'll talk about the vision for Fusion 360 Manage at our company. And we'll also talk about some of the goals-- process optimization, enhanced collaboration, and again, data-driven decision making.

So part of the vision for us was when we found Fusion 360 Manage-- and it's not that difficult to figure out. Centralizing data was key for us. For project management, for audits, for some historical processes, we converted over our numbering system, which was a historical process. We replaced an existing process in Fusion 360 Manage like our vendor management process.

And what Fusion 360 Manage brought to us was a means to communicate with upper management. And we did this through reporting and visualization. Now that we can gather data, we can show repeatability, we can start seeing the gaps in a process or a workflow. We can also show through graphs. Everybody loves graphs. It was a great means to communicate, and it was easy to understand that this was part of the solution.

Now, I wish I could say I was the visionary behind this. I've been involved in a lot of projects where I had a huge role where I thought what the solution was, I implemented it, and trained everybody. Well. This solution was thought out a long time before Josh and I got here.

A person by the name of Joe Wilson, who's a director at our company, he came up with Bridgestone Asset and Maintenance Management, referred to as BAMM. And he pitched this idea to the company that together, support our plants and provide the best value to our customers. So the first thing that was implemented or Phase I was a maintenance management solution, which is our CMMS.

And it's pretty straightforward. GUIDE Ti is the name of the solution. It supports Bridgestone's global standard. It traces costs, it traces the cost of equipment. The visibility of the reliability is there now.

And more importantly, it captures tribal knowledge. And I'll be mentioning this a couple of times down through this presentation. So we are now at the end stages of implementing our Maintenance Management solution. It's in Latin America. And recently, we brought in Phase II, which is Fusion 360 Manage, which is our asset management solution.

Now, the first bullet point there really defines everything else. And I mentioned before, we are trying to standardize a process and make it repeatable. Through repeatability, it's going to bring standardized machines, reliability built into designs. We'll be able to track a machine's life. And again, we'll be able to capture tribal knowledge.

Many companies now, are trying to capture tribal knowledge. And it's part of the why we have such a huge growth in digital transformation. We have a lot of people that are retiring that have been here 20, 30, 40 years. Well, how do you capture that knowledge? There's a lot of things that are not documented, and we needed to figure out a way to capture that.

So this slide here, I show how each solution integrates and connects with each other. So our PDM in the company is Autodesk Vault. And that's our documentation or our repository for design data. And we have implemented already as well, our maintenance management solution, which is CMMS.

And we have a connection there already. It's integrated, not fully automated. But it works well. People will go into the CMMS, click on a drawing. If they needed information, it will automatically open up drawings that exist in Vault.

So now we have Vault, which is going to be our process governance solution or our asset management solution. And what we plan to do this is control processes. And I show there, who has access to these solutions and what different areas.

So on the Fusion side for project management, we'll have project leads, cross-functional teams, corporate engineering, plant engineering, team leads, document consumers, or the plant floor. And on the other side, we already have access by the side of Vault designers, engineers, document consumers. And of course, CMMS exists in all our plants now.

Let's talk about benefits today. I'll let Josh start off with this slide here coming up.

JOSH WILSON: So currently, we do have seven workspaces implemented that are being utilized within the company. We went with these first seven on the idea in the principles of start small and scale fast. We wanted to get the most adoption early on to get people hooked in the solution and start building ideas of where else we could utilize and expand the functionality too. The first workspace we generated was our record retention workspace. And this was the first exposure on a company-wide scale.

This workspace is focused on helping us become more streamlined with our ISO compliance and what we needed to do to make sure that we were removing uncontrolled documents from our local machines and making sure that all of these controlled documents are being pulled from their local respected areas. This was a management-focused approval workflow, where we're streamlining and automating the actual approval and workspace syncs on these. What we're able to do is create a time field that, on a specific date, the workflow will automatically transition to out of compliance. And then we're able to give that user a specific amount of time to get back into a compliance. And their managers approve it.

The largest benefit with this workspace has been the reporting aspect of it. And we'll get into some reporting a little bit later. But upper management being able to just see a report, as to who's compliant, who's out of compliance, and how much time they have to get back into compliance has been key.

The second workspace we rolled out was our ESS request workspace. This is a general workspace to allow anybody within the company to request work from our team. We have a lot of different services based on our mechanical design or electrical design, our XR/VR solutions, our scanning solutions, and then our data management solutions as well. With this, we're able to streamline that request process, allocate resources to each one of these requests, and make sure that we are getting projects done in a timely manner and making sure that we're hitting our deadlines.

The third workspace we rolled out is a similar workspace to our request. But it's specifically focused for one division. Because that one division has a very specific workflow for defining and changing engineering documentation. With this, we were able to mimic their standard workflow that they have in Vault, based on their life cycle process, and with the goal of eventually integrating Fusion 360 Manage to Vault to automatically transition to this workflow.

The next workflow we implemented was an automatic package numbering system. What this is allowing users to do is anybody starting a new project can go in, set up some predefined variables based on location and type of equipment that they're creating. And then it's going to automatically create them a package number that they can use for their model hierarchy.

The next workflow we started on was our Vault access control. And this we have a class here at AU, that we go into a little bit more detail on this. And that class is called Putting Vendors to Work While Keeping Them At Arm's Reach. But a brief overview is we're utilizing this solution to streamline the request and data transfer to external vendors and collaborators, utilizing project sync.

And then we also have two other workspaces that are more of a development and issue tracking for our XR solution and for Fusion 360 Manage. Both of these workspaces allow anybody within the company to come in, submit a new idea, or submit an enhancement request. And then we have a dedicated workflow for those and estimated timeline for that project.

Some real world examples of improvement on this are notifications. Everybody associated to a request is getting email notifications when it's their time to participate in that workflow, for approvals, reminders, getting close to deadlines, or late past deadlines. And then the biggest thing is stakeholders. We have sections in all of our workspaces to define additional stakeholders that maybe they don't need to be part of the workflow, part of the approval process. But they need to be notified when certain things happen and deadlines and notifications come up within these requests.

So we're able to give them access to all the information they need, get them emails in a timely manner when notifications come in, and just streamline that process and give a little bit more visibility. And I'll emphasize it again. Reporting, we're able to report, create dashboards directly within Fusion 360 Manage, generate project level reporting for project managers and end users so that they can get in and see this.

And the last thing this is giving us is some pretty good KPIs. We're able to estimate more efficiently. We're able to see and keep on our deadlines to make sure we're hitting those deliverable dates, and just streamline that whole process, give visibility, and accountability in that entire process.

CARLOS CAMINOS: Let's talk about current projects. So I was fortunate enough to be able to work along Michael Brown. Initially when I got hired here, he was the engineering director. And was supposed to work with him to develop some of these workflows. And I don't know. God blessed me and told him he needed to retire early. And we were able to bring him on our team.

So it's really kind of a dream team that we have here with Josh, Mike Brown, and myself, and with also the help of IMAGINiT that we're able to successfully start creating this in a very scalable manner. Mike and I started by laying out what the manufacturing workflow was like. And the red box there in the middle is really stands for Fusion 360 Manage. The little box right above it is a list of processes that we think should be created in F3M.

To further explain that, all those boxes to the left are really our customers. That could be corporate, that could be plant, it could be team leads, different business units, and so forth. And to the right, some of the process start-- I show some of the process there like project management process and then some of the approvers to those processes.

So Mike and I and Josh started, we started with project management process. Every project that exists in our company goes through these three steps here. One is an idea stage. If it gets approved, it goes to a feasibility stage. If that gets approved, it goes to a funds request.

And then there, we started developing this that from there, the different processes would be kicked off the way it's manually done now. In this case, I'm going to show you our equipment release process. So if the funds request was approved for an equipment release, a new process would start. Additional information would be needed or not. Maybe it was all provided in the funds request.

And what I show there to the upper right there is that there's sub-processes that get kicked off during even that process. This is a pretty big process, this equipment release. And I'll let Josh explain some of that. Again, I have to highlight that.

We did this in Visio, Mike and I. And we gathered the information and with Josh as well. And then we started thinking about how we're going to lay this out in Fusion with the help of IMAGINiT. And you have to make sure you surround yourself with the right people to be successful. Josh, can you explain some of the details of current projects that we have going on?

JOSH WILSON: Yeah. So how we start a new project inside of Fusion 360 Manage is Mike and Carlos generally sit down and do a lot of discovery up front. This discovery with our different levels and different teams and different departments allows us to define and map out all requirements for the workflow and any data that's required beforehand. This has really helped us streamline the process. And it's actually built a lot of cross-functional teams that allow other teammates to give their input up front before we actually start making changes within the solution.

Once we have that discovery finished, Carlos and Mike create some wonderful Visio documents that are then passed down to me, where I can start reviewing these documents and reviewing all the requirements for there. I actually start getting into Fusion 360 Manage and start building out our workspaces. We do have a couple workspaces that are in process right now. And I'd like to share a couple of them with you.

The first one we have is our process improvement, our Continuing Process Improvement workflow. This is a streamlined process that all of our plants are going to be utilizing for any changes or adaptations within the manufacturing facility itself. This is currently in a User Acceptance stage. So it's just about complete.

But this is allowing anybody within a plant to submit an idea for the process improvement team to review. This process improvement team, on a biweekly basis, goes in and reviews all these requests. And they can then determine yeah, this is a great idea. Or no, this is not really a great idea.

If they say, yeah, it's a great idea, then they can start diving into it a little bit more. They can define how much time they think it's going to take, how much money they think it's going to take. And based on how much money and time, it's going to take it's going to depend on the different workflow routes that it's going to go down.

Is it going to be a capital expenditure? Is it going to be a local PO number that they can just build or bill off of. And then from there, we're able to streamline directly into procurement and then straight into our testing phase and operator training and then load testing, right to process completion.

Another workspace that we're currently in process on is our Project Management workspace. Now, we're only on Phase I of this workspace. But that's the image that you see on the right-hand side here. We all start out with an idea. All of our projects start by creating an idea.

That ISF workspace has its own workflow built into it. And we're able to define different levels of approval and stage gates, based on some parameters that are going to be required to be filled out on our Item Details tab. From there, we're able to say, OK yeah, this is under X amount of dollars and only needs plant manager level approval. So then, that's the only requirement for this to get accepted.

Now, if it became a capital project, we can look at the different teams that might need to be involved and get plant approval, corporate approval, safety approval, procurement approval, before that process then gets transitioned to the next workspace, which is our feasibility study. Once we're in feasibility study, we're going to start bringing in additional teams to help look at this project, really get a detailed scope on this project, build out our timeline, get all of our information up front, see how much things are going to cost. And then from there, once we have our feasibility done and approved that's when we go to FR.

Now all of this, every workspace completion, every workflow transition is going to send email notifications to the responsible people anytime it's their turn to look at something. We also have some pretty advanced approval gates and approval levels defined in here, based on different parameters. Then our next thing, our next workspace we're working on is our New Equipment Release, which I think is really exciting. We're estimating this to be about seven different workspaces all built in together, which is going to have our main Project Workspace, a Tasks workspace. We're going to have templates defined within there for specific documentation that needs filled out.

The great thing that this is going to allow us to do is start incorporating safety, procurement, quality, and engineering, all into one workspace to help streamline this new equipment release process. Now with all of this, we couldn't have done it without our guidance from IMAGINiT and Autodesk. We lean on them pretty heavily when we get stuck on a problem that we just can't solve. So without IMAGINiT and without Autodesk, we wouldn't be nearly as far as long as we are today.

The next thing we're going to talk about here is that advanced reporting that we've started to do. Yes, we do have reporting inside of Fusion 360 Manage itself, with our custom dashboards. And we do have a limit of six dashboards across that main screen inside of there. And we have our advanced reports that we can start building and running within Manage itself.

But what we've actually been able to do with the help of Tony Mandatori from Autodesk, is utilizing our scripting to within Power BI, automatically extract data from our Fusion 360 Manage workspaces and upload that into Power BI to create some of these advanced reports. We're then able to take these Power BI reports and publish them on internal locations, whether that be Teams or our internal Power BI site, so that management and end users in approvers can get in and see different reports for whether it's a new project or a new equipment release or just our standard compliance workspaces.

From here, we're able to define and see quickly our estimated hours versus our total hours worked on a project. We're able to look at different projects in their current state, what we're going to have in work in progress, what we have in for review what's waiting in procurement. We're also able to look at each project by our geolocation, because we have geolocations tagged into all of our requests within our workspaces. This is going to allow us to see who is using these requests and who is using the software the most for each one of these locations.

CARLOS CAMINOS: Let's talk about lessons learned a little bit. Initial challenges faced during implementation-- resource constraints. Whoever has enough resources for projects, especially when they start growing pretty fast? We have Josh internally, there's myself, our external resources. IMAGINiT gets overloaded pretty quick as soon as we start building out these extensive workflows. It's never easy, so that's something you need to pay attention to. You need to prioritize accordingly.

Data migration issues-- you need to be able to make some decisions. Are you going to keep original data where it's originally stored? Or are you going to import it? Importing is always great, but there's always challenges to that. You need to learn how to do that.

Legacy information-- you might want to try to, I don't know, whatever makes best business sense. You might want to keep it in Vault maybe. Or maybe you import everything into F3M.

Training and skills gap-- this is very difficult at first. You're introducing a new solution. Even when you start small, it's difficult. You need to make sure people understand what they're doing, why they're using the solution, and try to make sure that everybody kind of levels out at a medium level so that things are being created and completed in F3M accordingly without too much too many issues.

Overcoming resistance to change and fostering buy-in from stakeholders-- communication is the key here. You need to communicate multiple levels. You need to be able to explain to your peers. You need to be able to explain to management, upper management executives.

They need to understand why this is a solution of the future. You need to show them examples. That's one of the reasons why you'll hear us talking about starting small, to be able to scale.

Change champions-- align yourself with individuals who understand the solution, who will help you figure this out at different levels as well. It's not just your peers. It's management. It's upper management.

You need a feedback mechanism. So during this whole process, you need to re-evaluate constantly, especially at the beginning. You need to roll something out that works. You need to be able to update it. You need to be able to hear what the masses are saying, what individuals are saying, and you need to implement those changes. This way you get better buy-in from your individuals as well.

Gradual rollout-- it's important to start small. Small successes creates big wins. Again, this is always going to depend or come back to training and support. It's important to train the changes.

To support the solution, you need to be available. Josh and I are available by phone, by email. Our group has a group email. And if they have questions regarding F3M, it automatically comes to us as well.

The importance of customization to fit unique needs of the company-- tailored workflows, regulatory compliance, analytics and reporting. Developing workflows that align with specific processes and operations of the industry is important. People will understand that.

It takes a little bit of work. You have to do your research. You need to make sure you incorporate as many groups as you can that are affiliated to those workflows. You do not want to define these workflows in a vacuum. Part of our process is we involve plant engineering, corporate engineering, safety, compliance, quite a few different groups to make sure that we build a robust process.

So for our regulatory compliance, ensuring that the system accommodates a specific need. For us, we have record retention. It's an ISO compliancy for us. So we needed to make sure that the right approvals were in place, the right notifications went out to people. We needed to train individuals, and now we have a history moving forward.

Analytics and reporting-- it's pretty straightforward. But this is part of your key here. Once you start developing repeatable data, you can create analytics, you can create different graphs, you can create different reports, different insights. This will thus help you explain yourself and continue to move forward.

Best practices-- Josh, you want to talk about this a little bit?

JOSH WILSON: Yeah. Let's go over some of the best practices that we've found in our first year at implementing some of these workspaces within Fusion 360 Manage. We've said it before, but it's something to emphasize. Start small, but define scalable solutions.

You want to make sure that you're getting something out there that's equitable to somebody or equitable to leadership, so that they're able to see the value in the solution. But leave some back doors open that you can make sure you can scale that for solutions down the road. Because you never know another division that might need access to it. Or you might need to spin off another workspace from a given workspace you've already created.

Another one is clear communication. You want to make sure you're having clear, efficient, and effective communication with everybody involved. But especially, you want to explain the benefits of the solution to the team and get that buy-in. You really need to get upper management buy-in to make a successful implementation.

Training and skills development-- it's massive. First thing you need to do is get a good team behind you. Empower your employees to use Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage more effectively. In doing that, create documentation, not just end user documentation, create management-level documentation. Because you never know when you get so deep into something, you might forget the easiest, simplest, little piece of code to get a workspace transition going properly. So create documentation, document everything.

And lastly, continuous improvement-- you want to take the approach to refine the process based on feedback. Take that feedback that you're getting from anybody within your cross-functional team. Or even once you've already deployed these workspaces, get that feedback from them. Get an understanding of the core problem within the solution because it might not present itself the way that the end user is defining the problem. But really, take a look at the problem and narrow it down to the core and understand what's going on, and be able to effectively improve on your solution within Fusion 360 Manage.

CARLOS CAMINOS: Envisioning tomorrow-- this is one of my favorite topics here. So envisioning tomorrow, some future possibilities. Scaling up the implementation, integrating with other systems and departments has to always be on the horizon. You have to look at what your options are moving forward. You always have to see the future.

For us, it's going to be integrating with Vault. It's going to be ultimately integrating with ACC. It's going to be integrating with ERP. Those are things. That's where we're going. And we're looking to integrate with other solutions as well.

We currently have, as Josh mentioned before, our Process Improvement workspace. That is going to lead to tie-in to our Project Management solution as well, as the Project Solution is going to tie-in to our Equipment Release. So there is a bigger picture here. We might be building them separately right now. But we're building it in a manner that it'll take very little for us to integrate those even within Fusion 360 Manage.

The Process Improvement workspace now is very successful. I think it's one of the first workspaces that's really going to integrate multiple departments, different business units. It currently allows corporate engineers, plant engineers, multiple roles across different departments to use it, even plant floor users. So that's going to be very visible for us. And it's going to be a win-win for us.

One of the next steps is well for us, like I mentioned, was F3M connection to Vault. And we're going to use life cycles for that. Our vision is to release files through Fusion 360 Manage, release them into construction.

Embracing emerging technologies like AI, IoT, predictive analytics, we talked a little bit about predictive analytics. But I'll go into that a little bit more. Currently, our CMMS has a program utilizing IoT to gather data. I have to bring that.

We're talking about digital transformation. We have different efforts right now, going in the same direction. At some point, this data is going to connect with Vault or Fusion. And it's just going to get better over time. The focus needs to be that we all need to be going in the same direction. .

Predictive analytics is very important for us. I talk about repeatability being created from data and repeatable processes. That will lead into predictive analytics for us for similar processes and in other areas, as well.

So expanding the scope-- applying Autodesk 360 Fusion 360 Manage beyond process governance. So we have to be careful with this one right now. It's becoming very popular at our company right now, its capabilities, its ability to manage documents, to track, not track, but its accountability, its visibility.

People like that. People are starting to understand that we can integrate two different solutions. We're starting to get a lot of inquiries from different departments outside of our group.

So the roadmap moving forward-- so plans for refining and expanding Autodesk 360 Manage, I explained some of those. It's going to be a continuous effort to grow at a pace that we can handle. Incorporating feedback and adapting to evolving company needs, this is happening already. Like we mentioned, you need to take feedback, and you need to apply it where needed. And it'll help spread the word for us.

Commitment to staying at the forefront of manufacturing technology-- I'm not going to talk too much about this one right now. I'm just going to show my next slide. And it'll give you an idea of where we're going. And I'll add some more to that picture.

So we are trying to define the single source of the truth here. And for us, it's going to be defined by multiple solutions. It's very difficult to find one solution that's going to gather all the data that you need. What we are seeing here is that we're going to enter some information in Fusion. We're going to enter information in Vault, data that comes from our models, from other files.

We're going to be gathering, let's say, acceptance data from ACC at one point. And we're going to synchronize all that data so that you can see it in multiple places. You're going to see the latest and greatest data.

As you can see there, we already have our CMMS connected to Vault. We know that SAP can be integrated to Fusion, maybe to our CMMS as well. And we have other solutions currently in our group.

We have an AR/VR effort, which currently pulls models from Vault to create its educational stuff. We have a laser scanning program that currently, we do as-builts. And then we convert those to models, and we add it to Vault. So we are thinking what's down the road. And we're trying to make those connections early in order to get feedback from everyone to make sure that it makes sense.

On the bottom you see, that represents our manufacturing, engineering, and maintenance. That means all the users. Currently, everyone has access to all of those solutions. And so what we're trying to create here is consistent data across the board. This is in many ways, could be a digital thread for our data, where we can access it from multiple locations.

So in conclusion here, like we've mentioned, start small, train consistently, educate everyone, keep on going over your material, get feedback. The importance of process governance and technological innovations-- it's important to keep moving forward. Find the next best solution that might integrate to your solution.

I'm not telling you go find a new solution. Find things that will complement what you're establishing. For us, it all stems from process governance and creating that repeatability there.

Inspire innovation-- we are all in a position, where we need to inspire our peers, we need to inspire when we give presentations, we need to inspire in just normal discussions. Spread your education. Teach everybody.

We mentioned this several times, and this is super important, especially when you embark on a journey like this. Whenever you start talking, especially digital transformation for a company, you need to align yourself with a reseller and a vendor that can support all your needs. It might be multiple vendors. But you need to get everybody on the same page.

For us, with what we're doing, it's IMAGINiT, and it's Autodesk. They have been our backbone to our success right now. They support us very well. And we appreciate it. We wouldn't be successful without them.

Feel free to reach out to Josh or I. We're very active on social media. We're easy to get connected with.

Ask us questions. Talk to us after our presentations if you're in Vegas. Feel free to email us. Josh, do you have anything to add?

JOSH WILSON: No, thank you for attending here today. Just one thing to add on top of that is, Fusion 360 Manage, it's a complex solution, but you can really utilize it to do different tasks and different workflows to think outside the box. So really think of some really abstract workflows or solutions that you might be able to utilize it for that wouldn't necessarily be part of your design and engineering process, like our record retention, making sure we're staying up to date with those data governance processes. So it's not just an engineering and design tool. You can really utilize it within the entire aspect of the company.

CARLOS CAMINOS: With that, thank you very much for joining us with Bridgestone's Digital Transformation.