Connecting the Value Chain with Upchain

STEPHEN TROCHIMCHUK: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Connecting the Value Chain with Upchain. My name is Stephen Trochimchuk. I'm a manager of customer and technical training here at Autodesk.

Specifically, I'm responsible for the overall development and delivery of upchain specific product lifecycle management and product data management curriculum. This is going to include such resources as our live customer webinars, our e-learning academy, as well as various other learning assets and materials that are leveraged by our customers as they learn upchain each and every day.

I work very closely with the customer engagement team as well as product development stakeholders to identify opportunities to continually enhance and expand our training offerings, and ensuring that our customers are well supported as they drive adoption across their value chains.

So let's talk a little bit about what this session is all about. This session is primarily intended as an introduction to upchain. Of course, at the time of this recording, we are a recent, a new member of the Autodesk family. And of course, we're very excited about that fact.

And this session is intended to answer a lot of questions about, well, what is upchain, and how is upchain uniquely suited for enabling collaboration across today's product stakeholder network.

So we have a number of learning objectives for today's session. First and foremost, I want to talk a little bit about how what we call a decentralized product stakeholder network poses specific challenges to collaboration for organizations today. So we'll spend a little bit of time talking about what we mean by that decentralized product stakeholder network, and of course, talk about how upchain is uniquely suited to meet the demands of that otherwise disconnected value chain.

So we're going to talk about how upchain helps otherwise separate siloed teams and systems communicate, collaborate, and work together effectively. We're going to talk about how a unified user-centric PLM solution helps reduce complexity, both organizational complexity, but of course, complexity at the individual product stakeholder level.

And finally, we're going to review how upchain supports rapid implementation and onboarding to drive adoption across the value chain. We'll talk a little bit about upchain's unique approach to customer and end user enablement as well.

So let's get started here. So I mentioned I want to talk a little bit about the challenges organizations face today with collaboration, these challenges that necessitate a PLM solution in the first place. Of course, with what's going on in the world recently, we are increasingly faced with a working circumstances where our workforce is widely distributed.

Folks are increasingly working from home. Teams are working in different geographic locations and time zones, of course. And collaboration across those stakeholders is becoming increasingly strained and difficult, as folks find formal and informal ways of communicating.

Additionally, you know, it's kind of the trade off the, you know, the and more technologically advanced we get, the more systems that we use, the more tools we use, it produces a kind of information overload. And so of course, finding up to date information product data is becoming increasingly, increasingly difficult, as folks are using various separate tools, and staying all on the same page becomes an increasingly difficult task.

And of course, with today's markets demand-- market demands, excuse me-- the speed of change is putting a lot of strain on collaboration. Products are getting to market faster. They need to change to meet the changing needs of the market more quickly. And so keeping track of change, keeping up to date with the latest updates also becomes increasingly difficult.

And then, finally, as I've already kind of alluded to this, but teams are working with multiple sources of data that somehow have to get integrated and centralized and structured in order for folks to have consistent and ease of access to the information. And so of course, what happens here under these circumstances is that communication breaks down, folks have a difficult, difficult time understanding what's up to date, what's requiring change. And all of this necessitates a product lifecycle and product data management solution that meets these increasing complexities.

And so you might say, well Steve, of course my organization is struggling with collaboration. That's precisely why we're looking into a PDM or PLM solution that will enable the types of collaboration that you're talking about. Why upchain? Why not just any PLM?

Well, it's part of our thesis that the majority of PLM solutions out there today are not well suited for today's changing decentralized product innovation landscape. Instead, most PLM solutions have been architected for large, highly integrated organizations.

This is back in the day when one OEM essentially ran the show, with a very tightly integrated value chain. These PLM solutions have been architected with a extremely high level of customization. With very high levels of complexity, primarily because they were architected and implemented not with the extended enterprise in mind, but rather for the perceived complexities associated with engineering, and its specific user base.

So you have a system that is built for engineers by engineers not particularly well accessible for outside stakeholders. You have a set of very closed systems. Deep powerful, mind you, integrations with a specific set of mostly engineering tools. A deep integration with one particular CAD system, for example, typically the proprietary CAD system of the PLM vendor. And a difficulty to integrate with other systems.

So what you have here is PLM solutions have been engineered to be optimally suited for what we call a homogeneous value chain, right? Back when the OEM essentially ran the show there. Highly integrated organizations.

However, that landscape, as I've been hinting at, has dramatically changed. Most companies today are part of increasingly decentralized and dynamic value chains. More and more, you're seeing organizations take, for example, you know the auto industry, where as many as 70% of components within a design are procured in, the various components, subcomponents, and systems that are integrated into products today.

Products are increasingly multidisciplinary. You need an integrated bill of materials that can bring together and structure mechanical, electrical, and software data. You have, of course, an extended or broad product stakeholder network, both within the organization and outside of the organization. You can see in this diagram increasingly outsourced work to other engineering teams. Tighter collaboration with an extended range of customers, and of course, manufacturers.

And so what you end up-- what you end up with is an environment in which heterogeneity rules the day. Each of these different parts of the organization, parts of the value chain are working within their own particular sources of data, whether it's CAD, computer aided engineering, PLM, ERP, right?

And they are also resorting to increasingly informal and spontaneous peer to peer collaboration. Again, that ties to that rate of change challenge that I pointed to. Folks need to get things done quickly, they need to communicate quickly. And so they're resorting to more informal peer to peer collaboration, email, chat, phone, et cetera.

And so instead of a PLM solution that is designed for a homogeneous value chain, we instead require a PLM solution that is flexible, agile, able to integrate with a variety of different data sources and systems. So in short, you know, the PLM solution that supports this heterogeneous value chain needs to be itself flexible and agile.

Now, we've seen this play out with the common causes for why PLM implementations for organizations often results in underwhelming return on investment. For traditional PLM, it involves prolonged costly deployments. So in other words, less flexible solutions typically require a highly disruptive and painful rip and replace approach.

If it doesn't integrate with a system, the system needs to fit the PLM, and often you have users having to adopt entirely new software in order to get things done. The PLM systems often, as I mentioned, require high customization. They're often over-engineered to address every single corner case, instead of adding value.

And what ends up happening is with high customization, you require a high level of specialized knowledge and training, which again, can prolong and make your deployment implementation of PLM costly and time consuming.

Furthermore, as I'm already hinting at, the traditional PLM systems being more closed systems, lack that multicast support which creates barriers between engineering teams. The multidisciplinary engineering teams have a difficult time collaborating. You've got outsourced work where teams might be using different CAD systems than the one that the home company is working with. And so you have a real difficult time sharing information in real time.

And then furthermore, there's always challenges with sharing up to date data with external stakeholders. How do I communicate what's changed to my supplier network, to my manufacturing floor? We need to be able to share that data in real time, and that's very difficult when you have closed, difficult to configure systems.

And what this all ends up leading to is really what you're most afraid of, is poor user adoption, right? You have a set of unintuitive interfaces, disconnected user flows. The PLM itself feels alien and external to what I'm doing in my particular role as a product stakeholder. Customers will often tell us that the PLM system they used before coming to upchain, just to do some simple routine data entry, results in a cascade of different menus and interfaces.

And it can be a really frustrating, and as I said, kind of alien experience. Doesn't feel natural and it doesn't naturally integrate with their everyday user flows. And so what happens, ultimately, your user base doesn't-- is either doesn't like it, or if they have to seek workarounds in order to share information.

And so what happens right with your workarounds is that that's going to undermine proper product record keeping and enterprise governance. Folks are sharing information via email, informal means. They're going outside of the PLM, because ultimately, the PLM is not agile and flexible enough to integrate with the systems they're using. And it results in miscommunication, sharing of out-of-date information, et cetera, et cetera.

And so it's against this backdrop that upchain represents the future of product data and process management. Upchain is a cloud-based product data management and product lifecycle management software all in one. And it provides an instant on agile innovation platform that adapts to your organization's needs.

Upchain connects your product development processes from concept to production by giving engineering and non-engineering stakeholders access to real-time data and insight into product development processes. Now, it's not my intention today to run through a laundry list of features and capabilities that upchain offers, but rather, give you an insight into the philosophy or design approach that underpins many of these capabilities.

Because it's our belief that a connected value chain depends on democratizing data. You can think about democratizing data as the upchain credo, so to speak. It's our thesis that product data should be democratized, which means that data is instantly available to those who need it in the way they need it.

And so the way that upchain does this is by a focus on reducing barriers to entry, to access to data, and access to information. Our instant-on PLM is, of course, as a cloud based solution requires very minimal technological infrastructure costs. Deployment time can be done in a matter of minutes. There's no hardware required. It is a truly instant-on solution available in the cloud.

And, of course, access to the PLM by your various stakeholders is also instantaneous. As soon as they get access to a tenant and has an active upchain license, all that's required to access information anywhere in the world at any time is an internet connection.

Now, upchain enables multidisciplinary cross-organizational collaboration. That is, collaboration across different engineering disciplines, between different internal and external engineering groups, as well as across the extended enterprise.

Now, we do that on the engineering side by offering a CAD agnostic file management solution, i.e. we integrate directly with a variety of the leading CAD systems in order to maintain a consistent and integrated bill of materials.

So in other words, you know, it doesn't matter if your local teams might be using Inventor and a potential, you know, some outsource work might be done by a team working with SolidWorks. Upchain enables those processes, centralizes and structures the data in an integrated bill of materials.

We also automate CAD a drawing translations so that those files can be easily consumed downstream by other stakeholders. And we enable engineers and downstream teams to holistically view and interact with rich real-time 3D models and their corresponding metadata, and communicate and collaborate simply through their website browser, using powerful 3D mod-- excuse me, model visualization markup and communication tools. And then finally, our powerful workflow engine automate and streamline the various processes that govern the lifecycle of your design.

And of course, what would democratizing data mean if it wasn't-- if the system that facilitates that wasn't easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to learn? And now, it's a simple yet powerful idea this democratizing data, that product data must be available to those who need it in the way that they need it.

But we see these as necessary conditions for connecting the value chain that we've been talking about. When you reduce the barriers to entry, when you make it easy to be able to integrate and access the type of data that different stakeholders mean-- need, excuse me, depending on different life cycle states of the data, you really you truly do unlock the possibility for collaboration across different user streams and products stakeholders.

And so the question is, how do we deliver on this? How does upchain deliver on this uniquely connected value chain democratization of data, right? Now, it wouldn't be a mistake to say that this principle of democratizing data permeates everything upchain. It is supported by on a number of different axes, and two that I want to focus on in today's presentation are user experience, as well as organizational and role based enablement.

You get either of these axes wrong, and that's when your organization is going to run into the type of problems that I alluded to earlier with negative user adoption, folks working outside of the PLM system, unsure of how to connect their user workflows to the PLM system, and so on.

So for upchain, what this means is a focus on what we call user-centric PDM and PLM, i.e. PDM and PLM that works for the everyday product stakeholder, as well as from an enablement and training perspective, connect the chain program. Now, I'll talk about either of these in order here.

Let's begin with user-centric PDM. And so what do we mean by this user-centric PDM and PLM? Well, for upchain it means that PDM and PLM should be as complex as necessary, and as simple as possible. Not simple, but as simple as possible. We want to make it as easy as possible for different stakeholders to interact with PLM, to be able to find, consume, potentially review, and modify the data that they need to.

So what does this mean in practice? Well, upchain has been engineered from the ground up to be a natural tool for product stakeholders. And that starts first and foremost with the tools that they're already using. We integrate directly with the various engineering and productivity applications that product stakeholders already know and love. And therefore, very minimal disruption to their typical user flows. They're able to access up to date information directly in the applications that they're already working in.

We've engineered a modern intuitive user experience that enables end user efficiency and drives collaboration. It's an interface that's easy to navigate, requires minimal context switching, and therefore is as minimally disruptive to the product stakeholder as possible.

And we have built in automatic pushing of tasks and information to key stakeholders directly within the application and via email notification. And furthermore, upchain essentially acts as like the operating system behind the scenes, notifying stakeholders that when the data that they're viewing has been modified. They see exactly what has changed.

Rather than seeing a full notification of the change and providing links to all the data that might have been impacted, they're updated in real time that the information they're viewing is out of date, and they're prompted to update it in real time. The idea here is that this simplifies and streamlines the user experience, and it streamlines the interaction and use of the solution by different stakeholders.

So just a quick little tour, rather, through the interface here. We see the bill of materials as it exists directly within the web application, accessible directly within your web browser. And so this information is readily available, accessible in real time. It's a clean interface. We don't have a cascading set of menus and data entry points.

And of course, this view is entirely configurable by the end user. They can show and hide information based on their particular stakeholder needs. We also see here the 3D visualizer here that enables stakeholders to view in real time designs and models as they are happening. They are instantly available. The visualization is created in the background every single time, and a CAD user checks in a file.

That's going to be updated every single moment so that the stakeholders consuming this information downstream will be able to visualize and potentially mark up these views of the data.

Here we see a simple example of a change request form, where we can easily identify which data is affected by a change. Again, nice clean interface with a simple set of workflow actions there in the top right corner. And even our workflow editor, working as a tenant administrator, configuring the various business processes that are going to drive and govern the lifecycle of your designs.

Our workflow editors is a very simple to use interface, drag and drop functionality. No coding or special expertise required. Very easy to use and very easy to implement.

Let's have some fun now and take a look at some pre-recorded demonstrations that illustrate how particular product stakeholders can leverage upchain tools directly within their preferred applications to complete their daily work.

We're going to start off from the perspective of task and file management. So this is going to be looking at a relatively simple use case with a CAD power user. So in this scenario, a organization has a product design that they want to begin based on a standard release set of data.

So they want to take their existing design-- in this case, it's going to be a fishing reel assembly, their standard fishing reel assembly, and they want to create a copy of that assembly so that work can begin on the new iteration. So this is for a new project based on a pre-existing design. You want to create a new assembly so that the original is unaffected, and can go along its own separate developmental path.

So the first thing you'll notice here in this interface, and here you can see Inventor's open. We're working in the Inventor workspace. We have our upchain plug-in on the right hand side. So all of the work that's being done in upchain will take place in this CAD plug-in.

The user is just going to go ahead and log in using their single sign on, and entering in their Autodesk credentials. And once logged in, as I said, they're going to be performing all of their tasks directly within this interface, in the CAD space.

So upon logging in, the user notices that they have an assignment. They could access the assignment directly from there, or they can navigate to the project that they're working in and be able to view all of the assignments assigned to that user in this particular project.

Directly from the task that's assigned to this user, they can find the associated data set-- in this case, the assembly file-- as well as view all of the details associated with this assignment directly within that interface.

Very handy. The user can open the affected CAD files directly from the assignment. No confusion over which data sets you use. And now they're just refreshing the plug-in so that upchain can read, and just do a quick little sanity check to make sure everything that they have locally is up to date and no one else is coming along and checking out the files.

The user is going to go ahead now and select clone. In this case clone this new item. And again, that's creating a duplicate of the top level assembly, and essentially creating it as a new item in the system. So it's reusing all of the components, at least for now reusing all of the components within the assembly, but the user just wants to clone that top level so that work can begin at the top level assembly level.

So upchain is recognizing now that this new clone has been not yet registered. And so we're just confirming that we want to place this particular copy in the original-- excuse me, in the new project.

So now, upchain is just going to confirm, hey, you've got these files, do you want to create the new item in your bill of materials and reuse all the same components? Yes, we're good to go. And upchain is going to do its magic and check in the new files creating that new item, with a assigning a unique item number. And again, reusing all of the released components.

So again, the idea here is that once this assembly is now created in upchain in this new project, work can begin on the assembly level. Folks can come in and check out, start replacing components. Different CAD users can work at different levels of the assembly, now that we have a brand new iteration of this design in a development stage, and we can confirm that new item number has been created, and again, while still using all of those key components.

And so now, we can just simply navigate back to our assignment, and we can perform the workflow action directly within the interface. I kept things simple here. I'm approving my own task here. But the idea here is that not only have I been able to complete my work, receive my assignments, work with the proper data set, and I can also go ahead and complete those workflow actions so that those who assigned this activity to me can now confirm on their end, hey, this work has been done.

And they can confirm it hopping into the web application here, as I noted earlier. And we can confirm within the new project that we have a brand new fishing reel assembly based on the previous standard design, that can now be worked on, viewed, collaborated on directly within the various viewers and tools that upchain affords to the various stakeholders working in this project.

So a simple use case, but I think a powerful one, of just how few clicks and user actions are required in order to complete an admittedly simple but very common use case.

And so while the upchain CAD plug-in affords CAD power users a streamlined experience in which they can work directly within their preferred CAD software, and perform their everyday actions, receiving their assignments, and completing their work with most up to date CAD files and drawings.

Upchain also affords product stakeholders working downstream, who may be performing their routine tasks using Office Suite, for example, to access upchain tools directly embedded within those preferred applications. And this affords product stakeholders full visibility into project status, full access to an up-to-date bill of materials, and of course, the ability to not only just consume data, but update product data and documentation directly within these preferred work spaces.

And so we're going to take a look at another scenario here. Now we're taking a look at a day in life in maybe a project manager who's working on preparing a project report, to see how this PLM is enabled directly within Microsoft Office.

And so we have this project manager who is working on the PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint presentation itself is managed document version control directly in upchain. So the project manager is going to check out the file. They're going to perform some updates by exporting information from the project bill of materials, including a up to date image of the assembly model the associated technical drawing of the assembly, as well as an export of a basic-- excuse me, basic bill of materials containing some pertinent information that they want to include in their project.

And then finally, of course, that project manager is going to check in that updated presentation back to upchain, increasing its file version, ensuring that other stakeholders within the organization have access to the latest working version of that presentation.

So let's take a look here. Again, we're going to access the upchain plug-in on the right hand side of the interface. And again, you'll notice that the interface itself is very similar to what we saw in the CAD environment, again, providing that similar user experience across different systems.

So the project manager finds their assigned task within their assignments page here, and begins the workflow so that they can start their work. They navigate to the Documents tab to find the most recent version of the PowerPoint presentation. Checking out and locking that presentation for others, so that they can work securely with this particular document.

And they navigate to the bill of materials for this particular project, accessing the model linked to document function to quickly insert the most recent working version of that model. We also-- here directly within the drawing interface, the ability to drag and drop the drawing image immediately to the presentation. And then finally, accessing the most recent version of the engineering bill of materials, selecting a template that was pre-created here for easy export of information.

So in this case, we've exported the data set name, the description of the items, and the item numbers. So very, very streamlined easy way. Just a few clicks here, that this project manager has gotten complete up to date information exported out of upchain.

And what's of course nice about this is now that this is a working document in upchain, this user, whenever they interact with this document again, if they check it out, they'll be notified if any of this information is out of date, whether the model has changed, whether something on the drawing-- maybe an annotation has been added to a drawing, or some of the bill of materials attributes have been updated as well.

So the user just inputs their change descriptions, so that folks understand what might have changed with this document. They navigate back to their assignments tab, and complete the little workflow button to signal that their work is completed. And now the creator of this assignment will receive notification that the task is complete.

Now, that's a simple example. Remember, as complex as necessary, as simple as possible is how we want to keep things here. But I think it's still illustrative of the core point that stakeholders can easily access up-to-date product information in the way they need it, using those tools and environments in which they are familiar. So very easy to perform those routine tasks, streamlined user flows directly within the environment in which the product stakeholder prefers and is comfortable.

So let's now turn to the final component of today's presentation, which is a brief overview of onboarding and training. Let's talk a little bit about how we enable and support customers as they connect their value chains.

And I've alluded to this earlier, but we refer to our onboarding, implementation, and training program as Connect-the-Chain. You can see the connection with connecting the value chain, integrating a value chain via upchain.

Connect-the-Chain is a structure that enables rapid, efficient, and effective implementation and user onboarding, through which your organization will align with our customer engagement team to define technical requirements, and define a success plan that makes sense for your organization.

You'll work closely with our technical teams to configure your upchain tenant, to map to your existing business rules and processes, and migrate your existing bill of materials and parts libraries to upchain. Now, what's especially unique about our approach is that as an out-of-the-box configured cloud-based solution, your teams will have access to a live, configured tenant that may be used for testing and training purposes immediately from day one. Organizations can focus on immediate quick wins that ensure stakeholder buy-in and drive positive user adoption.

And here's where upchain's user-centric PDM and PLM really pays off in the relationship between user experience and enablement. For traditional PLM, with its complex interfaces and information flows that feel like they're engineered for really nobody outside of engineering, stakeholder enablement is a serious uphill battle.

You tend to see very costly time intensive training, and of course, retraining, that requires shoehorning users with disparate use cases and interests into the same homogeneous system. PLM activities feel like a bit of a burden to the end user, and adoption rates suffer.

You have different tribes within different teams using the solution to different degrees, and users employ the kind of workarounds that undermine the transparency and traceability that the PLM was designed and implemented for in the first place.

For upchain, a solution architected for the actual people in the extended enterprise, the learning curve is far less steep. Stakeholders are trained within the systems and applications they already know, which is far less burdensome and therefore much more scalable, and they can focus on value added learning experiences that trains people to leverage PLM in performing their actual roles.

Product stakeholders are busy, and they want to learn at their own pace. They want to learn what's relevant to their particular use cases and interests. So we've developed unique online learning streams for CAD power users, engineers, project managers, administrators, and procurement specialists, to name a few.

Each learning path takes no longer than a few hours to complete. It's a hybrid learning model, in which stakeholders can work through short video-based courses designed to build knowledge and confidence to perform everyday routine tasks. They learn what they need, when they need, and they learn using the tools they already use.

To complement self-paced learning, we also offer regularly recurring live instructor led webinars on best practices with upchain for particular stakeholders, which provides a live forum for trainees to ask questions and engage in dialogue with an upchain export, getting the support they need.

So I want to wrap up here with just a few concluding remarks. What have we learned today? Today's dynamic and decentralized value chain requires an equally dynamic and agile PDM and PLM platform. Traditional or legacy PLM assumes a homogeneous landscape, and therefore is not optimally suited for this changing environment.

To truly connect the value chain, product data must be democratized. This requires a PLM that is built from the ground up to reduce barriers to entry, eliminate bottlenecks between people and systems by enabling multidisciplinary, cross organizational collaboration. And frankly, it ought to be downright easy to use and learn.

Upchain's user-centric product design promotes seamless integration between people, data, and processes, enabling individual stakeholder roles in the tools they know and love, and simplifying and streamlining complex processes and routine tasks. The Connect-the-Chain program provides organizations with an industry proven methodology for configuring, deploying, onboarding, and training end users, one that emphasizes adding value by enabling stakeholders in their particular roles.

I'd like to thank you very much for your time with me today. Went a little bit longer than expected. But I very much appreciate your attention, and hope that you've learned something valuable about upchain today. Thank you very much.