Cloud Data Management with Upchain

KEVIN ALEXANDER: Hello. This is Kevin Alexander. I'm an implementation specialist here at Autodesk. And in the next 30 minutes, we'll be going through a demonstration of Upchain. A bit more about myself, as I said, I'm an Upchain implementation specialist here at Autodesk. I am a mechanical engineer by degree. Graduated in 1997 from the University of Louisville here in Kentucky. Go Cards.

Being a mechanical engineer, by default, I suppose I'm a Formula One fan. On the weekends, I'm also functioning as a Shadetree mechanic. After the session today, feel free to reach out to me either on LinkedIn or shoot me an email. And let's connect and talk a bit more about Upchain, although we will have a Q&A session at the end of the demo today.

So first off, what is Upchain? Well, one of my heroes is Albert Einstein, and he said, if you can't explain it simply, then you just don't understand it. So this is my attempt at a very simple explanation of Upchain. Upchain is the world's first CAD-centric, multi-tenant SaaS, instant on PDM/PLM system. And I'll, sort of, unpack this here. So but CAD-centric all I mean by that is we have built our own CAD connectors. We don't rely on third parties. We've done that heavy lifting and built these CAD connectors that allow us to manage 3D and 2D CAD in a very nice, clean fashion.

We are also a multi-tenant SaaS solution. Basically, what that means is we're very modern our architecture is scalable, it's robust, it's efficient. You don't have to worry about maintenance. You don't have to worry about upgrades. Upchain is evergreen. It's also instant-on. And what I mean by that is we can very rapidly onboard you. Our connect to chain program literally onboards our customers in one week. In one week you're ready to go. And you're up and running in your Upchain environment.

In terms of what we're going to cover, I'm going to go through a demonstration. And then I'll turn it over to some of my colleagues for Q&A. So from a demonstration perspective, we're going to go through the basic interface, show you how to navigate. Then we'll discuss Bills of Materials management and visualization. And then also we'll talk about CAD integration. Primarily, today I'll talk about mechanical CAD. Although I will briefly talk about ECAD or electronic CAD as well.

So with that, let's jump into the product. So this is the Upchain home page. Each user's going to see their own home page, because they're working on different projects, they have different assignments and things like that. At the top left, you see project containers. This is how we organize our content in Upchain. Think of the project as just that. It's just a container in all of my product development documentation, whether it's CAD, Bill of Material, document goes into that project container. So it's a very flexible approach for organizing content within a PLM system.

At the bottom of the screen you see three buckets of information. Notice them my assignments bucket down here. This is where Upchain is bringing my work to my doorstep. When I have an assignment in Upchain, not only do I see it here, but I'll get an email, and of course, in the body of the email I'll see more information about the task at hand. Let's dive into one of these projects. So I double click the project. That activates the project, takes me into the world of that project, if you will.

Now at the top left, you see the main navigation bar where I see common product development workflows. So we put these common product development workflows at your fingertips. So that you can easily get to that information. So we'll start here on the project dashboard. Basically, this is a health monitor. It gives me insight and visibility into how this project is performing, is it healthy, is it not healthy. And I can actually click on the dashboard, because it's live. And I can see the information behind the scenes that's actually building out that dashboard.

Let's move on to the Bill of Materials tab. As I said a moment ago, we've got an entire section dedicated to Bill of Materials management. So please just bear with me a few minutes. We're going to spend a lot of time on the BOM tab. I'm going to move on to the project overview. So if you've ever done any project management in your life, this screen should look somewhat familiar. At the left hand side of the screen, you see a project plan. On the right hand side, there's a Gantt chart, which is live, it's dynamic and updates as we update our project.

At the top right, I can see where I can add milestone, stage gates, tasks, things like this. The other thing I'd really like to mention about our project management functionality, is that it allows me to connect the project planning and execution with the actual management of the deliverables in the project. So what I mean by that is, every one of these tasks in the project can be linked to project deliverables.

So if you notice here on the right this review design task is linked to a document that lives in the project. And there could be many documents listed here. It's also associated with an item that lives in the project. And there could be many items there. So again, I'm connecting the planning and execution of my project with the actual deliverables that live inside the project.

Let's move on to the Business Process dashboard. I'll just describe this briefly. In Upchain we do have a workflow engine. And we have various types of business objects and workflows that we can manage. You see the list here at the top. So right out of the box we have requirements management objects and workflows, quality assurance objects and workflows, and change objects and workflows. So these are all ready to go out of the box. But again, we have a workflow engine that allows me to tweak those workflows and create my own workflows, to help me better map Upchain to my own personal company workflows.

Let's move on to the documents repository. So first off, what is a document. Well, there's a couple of different ways of thinking about it. In Upchain a document is basically any file other than a CAD file. So it could be a Word doc, it could be a PDF file, could be an Excel file, could be a Zip file, with maybe software executables, or binaries, or maybe analysis files, whatever the case might be.

So think of the document object as simply a container or a bucket. And I can throw whatever file type I want into that bucket. So it's a very flexible type of object in Upchain. And it is an object, so it's got a number and status for revision. So I can put it through workflow. And I can change control it. I can also use documents to build relationships. So I can create relationships from one document to another and create doc to doc relationships.

I can also associate a document to an item, which again, is what we call parts and Upchain. So for example, I have a material spec there for aluminum. I can associate that document to an item or multiple items in my Upchain environment. Now when I look at that document, I can see all of these items that it describes. Conversely, if I look at the item, I can see that it's associated to the material spec. And we'll talk about that a bit more later.

Let's move on to the Project Details page. Just two things I want to mention here. The privacy setting, that's the access control. Projects are either public or private. If it's public, then anyone that I've given Upchain logins to we'll be able to see those public projects. Projects that are private, no one can see them except for the folks I've specifically added to the project. If you notice here on the right, all projects have teams. And that team of people has roles. And those roles drive the workflow engine within my up Upchain environment.

Next, let's talk about BOM management and visualization within Upchain. So I'm going to dive in to a different project here, the webcam development project. So in Upchain, there's basically two ways of managing, and manipulating, and editing a Bill of Materials. There's what I like to call the top down design approach. And there's what I like to call the bottom up design approach.

So by top down design, what I mean by that is, I can create, layout, manage the Bill of Materials using either the web browser, which of course, is what we're looking at right now or Microsoft Excel. So I can use either one of those tools to layout and edit, to manipulate the structure of a Bill of Materials. And then later on down the line I can add my CAD data. Or I may never add CAD data, right? You may have certain components in your Bill of Materials that you don't have CAD data for, or you simply don't want to model the CAD.

And there's lots of examples here. Classic examples are things like paint, oil, grease, lube, maybe even your labels in your packaging and things like that. So maybe you add CAD data for those things, maybe you don't. Either approach is perfectly fine from an Upchain perspective. Then there's the bottom up design approach, where we sort of drive the structure of the BOM from a CAD system.

Now, the Bill of Materials that you see here is a little bit of a hybrid of both of those approaches. So right there is a web camera mechanical sub assembly. And the structure of that mechanical sub assembly is driven from a CAD system. Now, how do we know that just by looking at the screen? Well, number one, we've got these pretty little thumbnails, which sort of give the game away. But also, here on the right hand side, under what we call the CBOM or the CAD BOM column. You can see all these CAD files, OK?

So there's a 1 to 1 relationship between each of those CAD files and the corresponding Bill of Materials item here at the left. Now, these happen to be solid works files. They could be Inventor, they could be Creo Siemens NX, they could be Catia. It doesn't matter. The philosophy, and the paradigm, and the approach are all the same as far as that goes. So if I change my CAD assembly, if I add components, if I delete components, as soon as I check that CAD assembly in, my Bill of Materials will update automatically to reflect that CAD change.

Moving down, we've got a printed circuit board. Now, some of you may not have electrical components in your Bill of Materials. But many of the clients that I talked to do. And in fact, many of them, if they don't have a PLM system or they've got an archaic PLM system, they may never actually be able to see both their mechanical and electrical Bill of Materials come together in a single BOM. And we can give you that holistic view in Upchain.

I'm not going to get into a lot of detail for ECAD today. Let me just quickly describe the process. So in Upchain, as you can see, we can absolutely support the concept of an electrical BOM or electronic BOM. And the way you get that information into Upchain is you simply import it. Now, we do have a connector for Altium Designer, which makes this process a bit easier. However, we can support virtually any ECAD tool, be it Pads, Mentor Graphics, Cadence you name it.

Basically, the approach is the same. You import what we call an electrical package. That package has three pieces of information inside of it. It'll have an Excel BOM, it will have a PDF of the schematic, and it will have a zip file that actually has the ECAD project files inside of it. As you might suspect, the Excel BOM is what Upchain uses to build out this structure. So if that's something you're interested in, let us know, and we can schedule a personalized demonstration.

Moving on down. We've got other objects in the Bill of Materials there's a documentation object in the Bill of Materials. There's a packaging object in the Bill of Materials. Wiring. There's even a software object, right? And I could attach my firmware to that software object, and now we can manage the firmware in Upchain as a configuration controlled object.

Now, let's suppose I want to add something to the BOM on the fly, right here, maybe something like a label. So let's do that. I'm just going to click on the top level. We're going to create a new item. And when I create a new item in Upchain, Upchain asks me what kind of item I want to create. This list is totally configurable. So very simple to configure this list. We can map that to just the object types that you want to use at your company.

Additionally, each of these object types has its own part numbering. And I'll show you some simple examples here. So if I click assembly, you see how it adds an A to the front of the part number, and then it'll just assign the next sequence or the number available in the sequence. If I select perhaps purchase mechanical part, it adds a P. And then it'll, of course, put the part number. Those are just simple examples. Again, we can support whatever numbering scheme you want to use. If you've already got a scheme in place at your company, we can support that.

Let's move on. I'm going to give this item a name. Maybe it's going to be a label like so. Let's create that. And just that simply and easily we've added a new component in the Bill of Materials. You can see it down there at the bottom of the Bill of Materials. I'm going to come back up. Now, over here on the left, notice that every object in the Bill of Materials has three vertical dots. That is an Actions icon.

When I click that Actions icon, I will get a Context Sensitive menu. By Context Sensitive what I mean is this menu structure will change just slightly depending upon the type of object that I've just selected. So I'm going to walk you down this menu structure quickly. Some of these things we'll talk about, others we'll not get into too much. But from here, I can view the 3D model or the 2D drawing in our visualization environment. We'll talk about that in just a few minutes. From right here, I can create other business objects. We created an item a moment ago. But you can see I can create any of these other business objects and associate it to this item.

Moving on down. Right in here we've got our Bill of Materials operators, specifically copy/paste. Let me mention that for a moment here. That is how I easily reuse components. So if I have a component that I want to reuse in another Bill of Materials or another project, it is as simple as a copy/paste. I simply find the component of interest, I click Copy, and then I navigate to the BOM or the projects that I want to reuse that information. And it is a reuse. It's not duplicating that object.

Let's move on to the visualization capability. I do want to show you our comparison tool. So what I'm going to do here is compare the latest version of my webcam with an earlier version of my webcam. And there's a couple of different ways that you can think about this comparison from an Upchain perspective. So first off, we'll look at what we call a Bill of Materials compare. And so what Upchain does here is it takes these two configurations of the assembly, and it, sort of, lays them on top of one another, and calculates the delta between the two, and then color codes the report.

So the items in green with the plus sign have been added to the original model. The items in red with a minus sign have been deleted from the original model. And then any items in yellow have had some kind of metadata or attribute changed. And if I hover over the red exclamation mark, I can see what the change was. In this case, it was a rev change from AA to AB. So just a nice color-coded Bill of Materials comparison report that makes it very easy for all constituents to be able to see what the changes were from one version to another. Just a great tool. By the way, the system does this automatically as part of our change process. So as part of every change, Upchain will automatically bake this report right into the change request.

Next, let's look at the geometrical comparison. So here again, Upchain takes these two CAD models, lays them on top of one another, and calculates the delta from a surface perspective. So the surfaces that are in red have been deleted from the original model. The surfaces in green have been added to the original model. So just a couple of tools that, personally, I find really useful. And kind of unique in the world of PLM. I haven't seen many other PLM systems do a very good job of these kind of things.

Reporting. I'm just going to allude to this briefly here. In Upchain, we have lots of reports that we, sort of, bake into the product, item reports, BOM reports, change reports. But it's pretty common that our clients want to build their own reports. And it's pretty easy to do. So you can use Crystal Reports, you can use Jasper reports. And then you can expose those reports into the Upchain interface. So that's one option.

Another option is to use our API. So we have an API. It's built off of Open REST services, which basically means it's modern and scalable and things like this. But that API can be used to extract and put information into Upchain. But it's often used to extract information. And then once you've extracted that information, you could use it to do a lot of cool things, like integrate with an ERP system, or build reports, right? So we could use the API to feed information over to a third party reporting tool like a Power BI, a Tableau, something like that.

Import/Export. I'll just briefly mention this as well, because I think it's something that's pretty special about Upchain, actually. It's very easy with Upchain to import information in and get information out of the system. And you might say, well, don't all PLM systems work that way? And the answer is no. If you spent much time in the world of PLM, you will certainly recognize that statement.

So in Upchain, I can very easily import things in. I can very easily export things out. For example, I've got export to Excel, which simply does a BOM export. I've also got a bulk export, which is one of my personal favorites. That tool allows me, with a single click, to export all of the CAD data and all of the non-CAD data associated with a given part number. So it's really useful when you just need to build a package of information and give that package to a supplier, a vendor, a contract manufacturer, maybe even a regulatory body. If you have to submit information to the FDA, the FAA, one of these regulatory bodies, that Bulk Export tool's just fabulous for just collecting a bunch of stuff up and just shipping it off very, very quickly.

In terms of the table display you see here, it's totally configurable. I can drag and drop. I can resize columns, do all these kinds of modern web tabular things that you would expect. The columns themselves is also very configurable. out of the box. We've got a litany of attributes that we provide that just start working right out of the box on day one. But you can also add your own attributes.

So chances are if you're on this webinar, you're probably using a CAD system. And chances are your CAD data probably already has attributes inside of it. All of that can be brought into the world of Upchain. And once those attributes are brought in, once you map them to your card system, now you can start doing all kinds of cool things with those attributes, right? I can search on them. I can start showing those attributes on table displays, just like you see here. I can start reporting on those attributes. So a lot of cool things we can do. There are lots of flexibility.

Let's move on to our visualization tool. So in Upchain, we have a beautiful visualization environment here that we can use to analyze and do all kinds of cool things with our CAD data. Now again, chances are if you're on this webinar you're probably very familiar with CAD data. And therefore, you probably used some kind of visualization technology in a prior life.

So in Upchain, the visualization environment is integral to the experience. It's very tightly integrated into Upchain. In fact, it is always just one click away. Any time you see a thumbnail in Upchain, you can click that thumbnail and that will bring you right into the visualization environment. Now, the intention here is to take this wonderfully rich 3D and 2D CAD data and expose it to the rest of the enterprise, right?

To take this CAD data and expose it to purchasing, sales, manufacturing quality suppliers, vendors, contract manufacturers. There's a long tail there of people that can get value out of visualization technology. And again, it's integral to the Upchain experience.

So here at the top, there's a toolbar. I'll just mention some of the tools I really like. I like the Cutting Plane tool, right? Kind of cool. Be able to cut cross sections and cutting planes through our models. We've got an explosion tool. So if it's an assembly I can dynamically explode the assembly. By the way, you can manually create explosion states as well. There's also some measurement tools up here there's a palette with various types of tools for creating measurements and things like this. We'll drop a quick measurement.

There's also a palette for creating markups. So we'll throw a quick note on here. And we'll say something like, let's review at next meeting, whatever. OK. Now, I've interrogated the can, I've marked it up, I've measured it. Now what? Well, I can save the markup. So that's kind of cool. I give it a name. It'll attach that markup to the model. But, right, perhaps from here I want to raise a ticket, or I want to draw people's attention to this, right?

And so right from the visualization environment, I can create what we call an IR, which is an investigation request. In Upchain, this is kind of a jack of all trades. I can use the investigation request to raise tickets, to build problem reports. Very often it's, kind of, the front end of the change for process in Upchain. So maybe this is going to be a CAD change, description, I could give it a note. Dimension is too wide, something like that, too long, too wide, whatever.

I can pick an assignee. This list will be populated from a project. Now, that workflows that show up here is totally configurable. In fact, we expect our customers to build their own workflows so that they can map their Upchain world to their own business processes. So the workflows can be simple. They can be advanced and sophisticated. It's really up to you. And you can have as many of these workflows as you like.

All right. Last but certainly not least, let's talk CAD integration. So in Upchain, we have this little guy that we call the CAD connector. And this is the hub for all of our CAD. I've got the list here highlighted so that you guys can see this a little bit better. But out of the box we support directly SolidWorks, Catia, NX, Inventor, AutoCAD, and PTC Creo.

So regardless of which of those CAD tools you may be using, the Upchain experience is the same. So you download the CAD connector, you install it on the local machine, where your cat system is installed, and that Upchain CAD connector will automatically find all of the supported CAD tools, whichever ones may be installed on your local machine.

Now, what I'm going to show you guys right now is our Autodesk Inventor product. But the workflow, the paradigm, the philosophy, all of the features, functionality, all of the commands, are exactly the same in every CAD tool. So whether I'm using in Inventor, or SolidWorks, or Creo, or whatever it might be, the look and feel is going to be exactly the same. The flow and the philosophies is the same, OK? So over here on the right hand side, we're going to activate one of my projects. And we're going to go straight to what we call the project BOM, which shows me all of the components and assemblies that are inside this specific project.

Now, watch how easy it is to get going. So once I find the object that I want to work on, I simply right click, I click Open, and Upchain is basically ready to go. Now, I do want to describe a couple of things here in this dialog box. Here at the top I've got a configuration filter that lets me choose which specific configuration of the assembly I want to use. I've got a version filter where I get to choose which version I want. We're just going to use the latest of everything here.

Now, watch what happens when I click this Download button. It appears that Upchain instantly downloaded this assembly. Now actually, what happened was this, when I click Download, Upchain first looks inside what's called the local cache, which is a folder on my hard drive. So it's simply a cache of information. It's a lot like a web browser cache. So when I click Download, Upchain looks in that cache folder, again, which is on my hard drive. And Upchain says does Kevin have the latest working version of this assembly. If I do, then Upchain will stream that information right out of the cache, and we're ready to go, OK, which is actually what happened in this case here.

But what if my information in my cache is out of date or maybe I've never worked on this assembly in my life, in that case, Upchain is going to have to stream that information from the cloud down to that local cache, so that we can then open it. But again, the reason that this cache exists is to provide exceptional performance when you're working in CAD, especially when you're working on very large assemblies. And I've done a lot of testing. I've tested 10,000 part assembles. I've tested 50,000 part assemblies. And this caching mechanism really provides just phenomenal performance, even with the largest of assemblies.

Let's go ahead and open this model. Now, over here on the right hand side, now that we've got a CAD assembly up and going in our CAD system, we can see the structure of the CAD assembly. Now, the structure I see over here on the right, in the CBOM, will always match the structure that I see in the CAD systems feature manager, design manager, design tree, whatever you want to call it, depending upon the CAD system.

Now, notice on the right over here, in the CBOM, the CAD BOM, that this jaw is in a green font. That green means, or tells me, that that specific object is checked out. Now, who has it checked out? Well, if I hover over the red lock symbol, it tells me that my colleague Mark has got that object checked out. So that means Mark is the only person in the system right now that can modify that jaw, right? Now, I can look at it, I can assemble it, I can play with it. But only Mark can modify that jaw right now.

And so, if I want to work on that jaw, either he's going to have to check it in, and release his lock, or he's just going to have to go release his lock, one of the two. OK. Now, if Mark changes that jaw right now, makes a change, checks his in, I will receive an indicator that my object is now out of date. And, of course, I'll then be able to click on that object and update my object realtime. So from a concurrent engineering perspective, Upchain communicates those statuses so that everyone is on the same page. And we can, kind of, facilitate that concurrent engineering environment.

Now, let's suppose I want to work on this handle right here. Let's zoom up on that just a little bit here. You can see we've got a little too much clearance between that holder for the handle. So we're going to modify that handle a little bit here. So I'm going to right click on the handout. I'm just going to click Check Out. Now, we're in assembly mode. So by default Upchain is also going to check out the top level assembly. I don't have to do it that way. But I'm going to let Upchain do that.

Now, notice what happened over here on the right-hand side. The handle and the top level assembly are now in a green font, because I have checked them out. And the green lock right there indicates that I have them checked out. Let's open that handle in a new window. And I'm just going to go ahead and make this change here. We're going to make this-- it's about a 1/2 inch thick. We're going to take it to about 3/4, so we're going to make it kind of beefy here. And let's go ahead and finish this out. Looks good, nice and thick, nice and heavy duty. And let's come back to the assembly. And we're simply going to check everything in.

To check in. It's really simple. I just right click the top level. And click Check In. Now, what I've got here is the check in form. And it's requiring me to enter in a change description. That's an option. You can toggle that off and on. I kind of like it, because it provides a very rich history for the objects, if we enforce this change description. So we're going to say updated the assembly. And I'm going to say updated the handle OD, something like that. And we're going to say OK.

Now, I clicked the top level to check in. So Upchain is going to traverse the structure of the assembly. It's going to find any objects that are checked out, that have been modified. And those are the objects that are going to get checked back in. And there we have it. So very simply and efficiently we were able to use those right click Check Out, Check In commands.

And hopefully, you've seen that we have a very intuitive workflow inside of these CAD plug-ins to help you efficiently leverage the CAD system to get that information checked into Upchain. So I'm going to finish here. I'm going to turn you over to my colleagues for Q&A. But hopefully, you've enjoyed the session, and you found it informative. And again, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or email. And let's connect and talk more about Upchain. Thank you.