Keeping the Fusion in Fusion Lifecycle: How to Deliver a Successful Project

KATELYN WILSON: OK. So it's a lot smaller group than signed up, so if you want to move forward you can, or you can stay in the back. I won't hate you. I was a backseat person in college, so--

Welcome to keeping the Fusion in Fusion Lifecycle-- How to Deliver a Successful Project. So today we're just going to walk through a little bit about the implementation process with Fusion Lifecycle. There's going to be my perspective as an implementer, and specifically with the standard what I typically see within implementation.

But then I also have Dave Clifton here from Boa Technology, and he's going to give a little bit of detail about how their implementation went. It was a little bit different than our standard implementations with what we see with larger projects, so it will hopefully give a bit of insight from the client perspective. And we will have some Boa-- I guess the Boa Fit System that we'll pass around and let you guys see so you can get a better understanding of Boa and their product.

But with that, we'll just get started. And if you have any questions, we'll definitely leave time for that at the end. So my name is Katelyn Wilson. I'm the customer success manager at Advanced Solutions. We are an Autodesk partner and reseller, and we are certified to implement and integrate Fusion Lifecycle.

Prior to joining Advanced Solutions, I was a student at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. I graduated in 2015 with my bachelor's in industrial engineering. While at the University of Louisville, I had three co-op rotations in manufacturing. My first two were at a peanut butter plant, and I did a lot of process improvement at the peanut butter plant, implementing a little bit of Lean. And then my last co-op was at a company that manufactured glass for home use, as well as assembled cook tops for, like, GE. And there, I did a lot more with Lean and process improvement, standardization of processes.

And then, in 2015, I joined Advanced Solutions as an industrial engineer and process improvement specialist. In that role, I worked a little bit with warehousing and our software called Slot 3D to help companies slot their warehouse SKUs based on the most economic, as well as ergonomic, way. Then, I also implemented Fusion Lifecycle up until March of this year, and then I moved into my customer success manager role.

In this role, I'm focused on the technical pre-sale, so helping customers ensure that PLM is the right solution, as well as making sure that Fusion Lifecycle is going to be a good fit for them. So once we determine that, I do a little bit of implementation work, but my focus, really, from then on is adoption and expansion with Fusion Lifecycle.

So Fusion Lifecycle is subscription based, so it's really important that companies are adopting, that they are seeing their ROI quickly so that they're going to keep using it and expand. So that's what I'm here for is to really make sure that the customers are happy, that they're being successful, and that they're improving.

In addition to my work life, I have a bit of a personal life, and I enjoy camping. I have a tiny camper, and I am the director, along with my husband, of the TearJerkers chapter for the bluegrass state. So we host to meetups twice a year for other people in the state with tiny campers or teardrops to camp together. I have three dogs that I love dearly that I enjoy spending most of my time with. So if I ever have a call with you and you hear dogs barking, I work at home with three of them.

And then, other than that, I help my husband with his side business. We have a CNC business where we make [INAUDIBLE] upgrades. But that's what I spend most of my time doing.

DAVID CLIFTON: I'm David Clifton. I'm the director of document control. I'm the configuration manager, engineering change analyst, and the administrator for Fusion Lifecycle at Boa, which I've been performing for two years now. I've been a PLM administrator and a change analyst for better than 20 years.

I've used multiple systems. Primarily, electronics was my core competency in all those years. Boa was a major change for me. But I think that I brought a lot of experience to Boa that has enabled us to make some life changing, life altering decisions at Boa from my perspective as a career. It really made a lot of difference in what I thought PLM was for.

KATELYN WILSON: So how many of you guys have Fusion Lifecycle? OK. How many of you guys know what Fusion Lifecycle is? OK. And, I guess, how many of you are in the process of deciding if you want to go the Fusion Lifecycle route or go a different PLM route? OK, cool.

So the learning objectives for today-- I kind of outlined a little bit of that, but to get more detailed, we're really going to understand best practices for a Fusion Lifecycle implementation, all the way from the beginning to deciding if you guys need a Fusion Lifecycle or other PLM system to you've implemented it-- now, what do you do? We're also going to understand the data that you should gather and when, and with that, what people should be involved throughout the process. Because that can be a bit confusing at times, especially if you haven't done a PLM implementation.

And then also, we're going to cover really focusing on learning to visualize the end goal. I think it's really important with Fusion Lifecycle to have the end in mind so that at the beginning you have success defined. That's when you're deciding what PLM system you need, how you should build it out-- you know what your objectives are with it. And then also, once it comes to the end of your implementation, you can come back around full circle and say, we've done x, y, and z. We've crossed all these things off. This has been successful.

So with that, a little bit about Fusion Lifecycle. Fusion Lifecycle is a cloud based PLM system, which means you can access it anywhere at any time. As long as you have connection to the internet, you can use it. So if you're on the plane traveling, like I often am, you can get on with the internet. If you want to log in on your cell phone to Safari or a Google App, you can access Fusion Lifecycle, really, as long as you have that connection to the internet, which is fantastic.

It also improves product lifecycle management, your processes, as well as managing your projects from a high level management aspect. It connects people more effectively because of the fact that we can connect from anywhere at any time across the globe. I've even had a lot of success-- and Dave can account to customers in China, as well, which I know has always been a concern for a lot of us that have people out there.

Additionally, it improves how companies can create and build and innovate their processes or their services that they offer. And so why you pick Fusion Lifecycle-- so a lot of people pick it because of the cloud based aspect behind it. There's a lot of things that people want to pick Fusion Lifecycle for.

But Fusion Lifecycle allows us to continuously improve our processes by providing us with standardized systems. We have one standard system. We have standardized processes that we go through every time we do, perhaps, a change order or MPI, and with that comes the standardization of our data. And having standardized data allows us to have something that we can search on, report on, and be able to see how can we improve ourselves with Fusion Lifecycle. It also provides us with our single source of truth for data. It helps collaborate with third party vendors, suppliers, manufacturers, again, whether they're where you're located or across the country, or even the globe.

More reasons why you may choose Fusion Lifecycle are things such as increasing your time to market. Fusion Lifecycle really allows us to increase productivity, as well, by allowing us to eliminate non-value added tasks. So by having one single place to do our work, one single place to look for data and enter data, we avoid doing re-work, we avoid doing manual data entry, we avoid the issues of searching for data or trying to track something down via email because it's all just handled within Fusion Lifecycle.

And then with that comes the decrease of cost and risk, as well as cash flow. And I think another big thing with Fusion Lifecycle that I've noticed with a lot of customers is with non-value added activity, they're also able to eliminate some of their meetings. I had a client who was able to eliminate a meeting-- I think they were having it once or twice a week for an hour a week, and Fusion Lifecycle enabled them to eliminate that through reporting and data that they were capturing.

And then, another reason people pick Fusion Lifecycle is because of the flexibility. So Fusion Lifecycle comes with what we call out of the box processes. And this just means when you get a Fusion Lifecycle tenant, there are workspaces, which are the processes, that are already built out that you can adopt right away. This is great for customers who maybe don't have defined processes yet, like a lot of quick start or-- startup companies will pick a quick start package because they can just start using Fusion Lifecycle right away.

It's also great if you don't necessarily have a very standard process. You may be a mature business, but you want to adopt what's in the system, or adopt some better practices. Some of these include quality management, things like non-conformances, corrective actions. We also have change management, so deviations, change requests, change orders, problem reports. All of these come built out in the system that you can utilize, modify, or build directly from scratch.

There are supplier vendor management, so if you want to manage data about your suppliers, have them come into the system and collaborate, perform supplier quarterly business reviews, supplier corrective action, supplier audits-- Fusion Lifecycle can help with managing all of that. NPI's another big one in Fusion Lifecycle, or NPD, so managing the developments of your products or your services from initial conception all the way to go to market.

There is obviously bill of material management, which most people think of when they think of PLM. So managing your build of materials, your revisions, making sure that you're not making modifications unless you're going through the proper approval processes. And with that comes not allowing people to edit data that they shouldn't, so if you have suppliers in your system, you can limit what data they can even see, as well as what data they're allowed to modify.

And then there's also custom processes. So Dave will talk a little bit about that, but some custom processes we did with Boa included color management. With other companies, we've done things like requests for quotes. One company did a little bit of small purchase order updates. High level project tracking.

But really, the number of workspaces that you can come up with and customize is unlimited, which is the beauty of Fusion Lifecycle. You're paying for licenses, not how many workspaces you're using. So whether you decide to use change orders or change orders plus 20 other processes, the cost is the same. Once you boil it down, it's just licenses. So I'm going to let Dave talk to you guys a little bit about what Boa does.

DAVID CLIFTON: Does anyone here have a Boa equipped pair of sports footwear? Yeah? What do you have? Golf shoes? Anyone else? No?

So what is Boa? Boa is a system that replaces shoe laces on sports footwear. It's composed of three components. There's a reel, a lace, and a lace guide, and they're engineered together as a system specific for the application.

We started 17 years ago. A father was frustrated at the frequency that his son's skiboard boots were breaking their lace on the ski slopes of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. So one day, the father went into the garage, and he designed a ratcheting reel mechanism with a spool inside around which he wound very thin, very lightweight stainless steel braided cable. That cable he laced through the islets of his son's snowboard boot and attached the dial to the boot itself.

So the short story there was that the boot laces never ever broke again. And it was so successful that friends and family, other members wanted the same thing done to his boots. So what began on the ski slopes in Colorado in 16 years, or 15 years, grew to an industry where there are now, as of 2015, there were 35 million installed Boa systems worldwide on all kinds of sporting shoes-- obviously, skiboard boots, but golf shoes, running shoes, cycling shoes, safety shoes, fireman's boots, fishing waders.

The list is still growing today. We're putting them on helmets-- safety helmets to adjust the strap. We're branching into the medical industry. You can get now a splint instead of made out of plaster, it's got a Boa attachment to it. You can tighten it to make sure it's tight, and you can take it off to take a shower or to scratch an itch, and you put it back on and tighten it. Back braces. The attachment of artificial limbs are all now incorporating the Boa dial system.

It's really pretty simple. I've got a couple of samples I can pass around. The typical application-- you pull it to release. You push it in, and you just rotate it and it'll adjust to your foot.

What we're really targeting with these things is a performance fit. They're not on the entry level shoe. They're going to be on the upper level echelon of the sporting shoe. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Are they putting those on football helmets? I've seen [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID CLIFTON: Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE: So they can do that. I didn't know what it was.

DAVID CLIFTON: It's a Boa. Yeah. But we had a problem in 2015 because, after growing from one pair to 35 million-- I'm sorry, 65 million-- we hit a roadblock. All of that time we were using spreadsheets.

We were using Trackvia. We were using [? Bug's ?] Project Manager. We were using SharePoint. We had multiple sources of data. We had some systems-- because our manufacturer is in China-- we couldn't get our system in Denver to talk to the systems in China because of the firewall restrictions with the Chinese government.

Some of our other software systems, like Trackvia, wouldn't even work in China. So now we had somebody in China who was transposing data manually out of Trackvia, putting it into a spreadsheet, emailing it to us. We were having to copy that data, put into a master spreadsheet. It was a mess.

We knew we had to have a paradigm shift. And there were enough engineers that work at Boa that time who had experience with PLM to know that that was the first solution we needed to bring online. And so two years ago, I was hired to come into Boa and help implement that.

Boa had already purchased one system, and it wasn't long after I was there that I determined it wasn't going to be a proper fit for us. One of the first eye openers for me that really changed my opinion of PLM, coming from an electronics background, was that as simple as these little guys are, all the parts-- except for occasionally there's a metal part-- most of this is an injection molded plastic part. And we use different types of plastic.

We use polycarbonate, polypropylene, nylon, glass filled nylon-- various ones. But our customers require these to match the shoe in color. And there are more than just seasonal palettes. There are palettes for welcome back to golf, back to school, ski season, right? All these are additional palettes that these shoe manufacturers go through, and as their partner, we have to make sure that our dials not only match the colors that they choose for their shoes, we have to make sure that that plastic-- and regardless of what the type of plastic is-- those match the same color as well. Every one is a different recipe.

And we are now trying to control over 12,000 different Pantone colors in five different parts that go into this reel. Some you see, some you don't. And the permutations that that presented us with was a pretty big number.

KATELYN WILSON: What number was that?

DAVID CLIFTON: 2.075 times 10 to the 18th power. In my life-- in anybody's lifetime-- we're never going to have that many combinations. But it brought to the forefront, we needed a PLM system that was flexible enough, one that could expand with us, and one that we could customize for our application.

I had heartburn immediately thinking of a parts and assemblies workspace with a bill of material in there that not only represented the five, six, seven parts in this guy, but 10,000 different combinations of the same thing because the colors changed. And to have all that in one workspace, I saw a workspace that was just going to be unmanageable.

So the flexibility that we got from Fusion was that I didn't have to put all that in one workspace. I have a workspace for my top level SKUs, yet there are thousands and thousands and thousands there. But I can drill down into and jump across to another workspace where I have my top level, basic engineering assembly, and that will jump over to another workspace where I actually control the sub assemblies, the individual components. And I have another workspace for my documents that control the destruction of it and all that. Sure.

AUDIENCE: Did you actually design the system in Fusion, the actual mechanical [INAUDIBLE]?

DAVID CLIFTON: We are a SolidWorks engineering shop. We are still kind of evaluating moving some of that to Autodesk. Part of the decision that happened two years ago was that simultaneously, with bringing on PLM, they wanted to bring on ERP, CRM, a configurator, and that's a remarkable jump for a company, right?

We're still struggling with ERP. CRM is hardly off the ground. We realized real quick that we had to have a configurator.

But PLM was the first thing that came online. It was the first thing we went fully matured with. It got everything under control. We had a single source of truth because everything-- all those spreadsheets-- went away. Trackvia went away. And with the Autodesk Cloud, we were able to communicate with China without having an issue with the firewall restrictions. So we were off and running.

KATELYN WILSON: I was going to take that.

DAVID CLIFTON: Oh, you want that?

KATELYN WILSON: Yeah. So I think you covered everything with your guys' PLM need, as well as why you ended up choosing Fusion Lifecycle, which was an interesting process, like you said, with the fact that you guys already had a PLM system that Boa had recently acquired before you were brought on there. But then there's also--

DAVID CLIFTON: In two years, from 2016 to 2018, that 65 million dials installed worldwide-- 135 million today. 100% increase in two years.

KATELYN WILSON: So do you want to talk a little bit about the molds a bit further? I know you mentioned that you guys use injection molding.

DAVID CLIFTON: Plastic injection molded uses molds, right? So it was a complete nightmare. We had molds in China. Some we couldn't even locate. Some we had a fairly good idea of how many shots had been performed on that mold.

And the molds are hardened steel, but it was an education for me to find out that plastic will still erode a hardened steel mold. Molds have limited life. And what we were able to do in Fusion is create custom workspaces that managed the life of a mold.

We have an import that happens daily now in Fusion where we record how many shots are on all the molds on a production line in two different locations in China. We have JavaScripting in the background that will automatically calculate, once that import runs, how many shots are on that mold, how many shots do we expect to get on that mold out of its full life, what percentage of that life is left. We have flags that automatically send a message when we reach 25%, 10%, and 0% of a mold.

In the meantime, that gives us the tool to plan new molds to bring online. So we may have five, six, seven, eight molds to make the same part, but some of them may be in the construction phase, some of them may be getting ready to be retired, and some of them are just sitting on the shelf waiting to be used.

And what that does for us is great. If we know we have a burst of production we need for a given customer for a given mold, or given part, we'll put five, six, seven, molds on the production line at once, run that production burst, and then we can back them off. If we have a mold that has to have maintenance, we know because we've preset when we think this mold should be maintained.

That information comes out of Fusion, sends an email, says pull this mold offline, repair it, put another one in its place. Don't use the one that's got 95% life left, go with the one that's 10% life left. And it enables us to do all that stuff.

KATELYN WILSON: Yeah, that's great.

DAVID CLIFTON: And then the color we manage as well. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID CLIFTON: I wish. It's a challenge working with China because of the level of education that your worker in China-- your average worker-- has, right?

So what we developed in Denver is a very simple Excel spreadsheet that is password protected. All they can do is enter data, and the data has to be entered in a certain way. Three columns, on average-- the date, the mold number, and the number of shots that day.

What is the number on the counter? We don't even have them do the math. What is that-- it's like an odometer in your car-- what is that number today? And they send that to us in that spreadsheet, and it runs anywhere from 25 to 100 lines long. But it's specifically formatted a certain way.

Advanced Solutions helped us build a tool that we launch every morning. We import that spreadsheet into that tool, and that tool writes to Fusion, fills in a grid tab for that mold, and all the calculations are done automatically in the background. On average, it takes 15 minutes a day and we're done.

And that's a spreadsheet from multiple locations. We have one for Shenzhen. We have one for [? Xiangxi. ?] And so it's all done every morning.

Plus, we have another spreadsheet they send us for maintenance. We track, if they pull a mold down to perform maintenance, what are you doing to it? And we have categories that they can enter in like a broken feeder, a rough surface, things like this. And now we have a metric because we can look in Fusion and see what is the most common failure for a specific mold, and we can come back later and maybe redesign that mold in a better fashion and make it more durable and have a longer life.

Once we get that data into Fusion, we're mining all kinds of stuff out of it. It's really been helpful.

KATELYN WILSON: So with that kind of comes the process of-- we've heard the successes with Boa and Fusion Lifecycle and how it's drastically increased their productivity, but how did they get there? So implementing Fusion Lifecycle, or implementing any PLM system, is going to start with the discovery process of one-- determining that you need PLM. And with that comes a lot of things.

So the discovery process is a joint effort. It's going to be the software company-- so for us, as implementers, we're meeting with our prospective clients to go through why do you think you need a PLM system? What do you need out of a PLM system-- so this really comes with defining your goals at the beginning-- so that we can determine what is the effort involved to implement a system that's going to meet your business objectives, that's going to allow you to collaborate with your suppliers, or restrict access to certain users? That we can come up with an estimated budget of the resource requirements for your project.

This includes estimated timeline, as well as what's the resource hours involved from an implementer perspective? This can vary on projects. So some of our projects are predefined where we have some packages that we put together and customers can pick from that. We know it's always 40 hours if you pick this, or 80 hours. But then we also have flexibility, where we can say we're going to do an entire implementation that's taking on many processes, and it's going to take several hundred hours. Or we're going to get together and do it collaboratively, which is more what the implementation was like for Boa and do it in a little bit less time because we're going to train you as we do it. You guys are going to help with that work.

So in the discovery process, there's obviously some preparation. So as the implementer, as the person determining is Fusion Lifecycle the right fit for you, we're having pre-sales meetings. And in those pre-sales meetings, I'm discovering about your processes. I'm asking questions.

What are you hoping to maintain in Fusion Lifecycle? How do you currently maintain them? What does your part numbering look like? What does your revisioning scheme look like? How many people are involved? Where are they located? Things along those lines are the questions that I'm going to be asking.

And then with that I develop a scope. If I determine that PLM is not the right fit, maybe you're really looking for ERP systems, which happens sometimes with smaller scale companies. They don't necessarily know if their startup-- is it PLM that they need? Is it an ERP system? Sometimes there's some confusion about what's the difference between ERP and PLM and PDM, and so that's where a lot of this comes into play is vetting out is this the right opportunity for you guys?

And then from your guys' side, you're getting the executive sponsorship. So without that executive sponsorship, you're likely not going to have the budget. You're likely not going to be able to move forward with an implementation. So that's typically one of the first things that happens is we decide we need PLM, we get an executive on board with that.

There's also evaluation of your current systems. That's just coming with what do we currently do? Why do we need PLM? Are we coming from spreadsheets? Are we coming from a different PLM system that was great when we were smaller, but now that we're expanding and growing we need something more robust?

You're reviewing your processes, again, determining what you want them to be like because, obviously, you're going to come from a place. And the goal behind getting a system is going to be that you're improving. So evaluating those and engaging in these pre-sales meetings, again, oftentimes with many implementers or many software companies.

And with that, I think it's really important-- and if you take nothing else from this meeting, at least take this, which is visualizing your end goal. If you want to have a successful implementation, you're really going to need to make sure that you have goals defined. Again, they can be very simple. We want to put everything into one place, have a single source of truth.

It could be more complex. We want to improve our processes by x percent or decrease our returns by x quantity a year. But I it's really important that we define this upfront so, again, when we get to the end of our project, we can truly say, have we done what we need to do? And I've found that for a lot of implementations, when we didn't define success upfront or we didn't define what their true end goals were, when it came time for them to test their system, they sometimes lacked what they should be testing because they didn't know what they really wanted out of the system. As well as when they did go live and they started using it, it was difficult for them to say, has this system done what we need it to do?

And so that's really important, again, for being able to one-- keep Fusion Lifecycle. That's a lot of effort that you guys put in as the clients. But two-- it's really going to give you the best and most successful project.

And so some key takeaways. This was a really important one for me when I was a bit newer to Fusion Lifecycle. I knew I knew a lot about Fusion Lifecycle. I had gone through training and certifications, but I didn't always know about different industries.

So for example, I had a customer in the refractory industry, and that was not standard manufacturing, which I had been trained in college and in my experiences. So I kind of went into that a little bit nervous. I didn't know anything about refractory.

But I had to kind of take a step back and realize that I know Fusion Lifecycle from an industrial engineering perspective. I understand processes and how to manage them. And so that's what I focused on. And that's what I had that same company that was a refractory industry focus on.

You guys know your processes. I know the correct questions to ask you and how to evaluate your processes. So just remember what you're an expert in, what you're implementer's an expert in, and don't worry about maybe any gaps that you may have. They'll come along as you learn more about the system.

And then lastly, keep that definition of success in the foreground, which I'm going to kind of elaborate a bit more on when I talk some more about mobilization. So mobilization is different across implementations. Mobilization is you've decided you have wanted to go with Fusion Lifecycle. You received a scope. You signed. You're going to implement.

The mobilization is really where we're defining out. So we're going to have either online meetings or on site meetings. These can be on site for a day and a half or two days consecutively. These could be online over the course of a week for a few hours. And what we're doing in this is digging down deeper into your processes. Your implementer is going to be determining what are your data requirements, going down all the way to what fields do you need?

So during the pre-sales discovery part of it, we're not getting into how many data fields? What exactly are they? We're kind of high leveling it just to get the idea of what this is going to look like. But when it comes down to-- I need a part number field and a description field-- this is what we're really getting into in mobilization.

So your implementer's coming either on site or online, evaluating your processes, determining how they're going to work in Fusion Lifecycle, what that will look like, coming up with a project plan that's going to outline here's what we're building, here is when we're building it, here's when you should test it, here's our communication plan-- all of the things that are going to bring together the actual implementation of Fusion Lifecycle.

Now, sometimes this can differ, which Dave will talk about. Since Dave did more of a collaborative effort with their implementation, they didn't have a real defined mobilization where we came on site and evaluated. Some of that also came from the fact that they purchased a quick start, which is an offering that we have packaged. We have an idea of here's the processes we're implementing. Here's roughly what we'll change, but it's up to the client to kind of decide from those parameters, what am I going to do? So it's a bit more structured.

So Dave, what did you do-- I guess, how did your guys' project come together in terms of communicating and having sort of this mobilization idea?

DAVID CLIFTON: We wanted to get an immediate ROI on our implementation. So what we did-- we categorized our product into low activity, low component count, simplicity, and age of that platform. And I had a single liaison with engineering who didn't report to me, but he was at my beck and call. And together, we worked on transferring data from engineering-- from PDM Vault-- and loading via the Import tool, which is a tool that you're given in Fusion to use a spreadsheet to load your database from a spreadsheet.

So we picked the least active Boa component-- Boa platform-- and started loading that data in. As soon as we had our parts and our assemblies loaded, out of the box we had a change management workspace and some quality workspaces. Then we went live with that platform right then.

I was the conference room pilot. A couple of engineers would come in and observe-- review what we had loaded, and that was our user acceptance test. So we went live with that platform-- low activity. There might be an ECL that would come along here and there, but we mapped out our entire product line on a project table of about six months' duration from simple to the most complex. And we did the most complex last.

But what was great about that is we had immediate go lives with every platform through that period. And as we learned what we were doing in Fusion, in parallel we started thinking, well, wait a minute. We can create a workspace for color. We can do one for molds. We can do one for a bunch of different things.

It may not be your typical PLM application. Once you get past parts and assemblies, change, quality, and document control, you kind of get to a point where most other types of PLM systems-- you're done. But the beauty of Fusion is that with these unlimited workspaces and the ability to customize them, we began inventing new uses for PLM that were totally unheard of, from my perspective. And we're still doing that today.

But it was stretching that timeline out, having immediate wins, that really paid off for us. No one from Advanced Solutions or Autodesk ever set foot at Boa. All of it was online. I got to where my partner at ASI would call me once a day, and we would report on things that we had discovered or fixed the day before. After that call, I would write down the things I needed to talk to him about the following day.

At the end of my work day, I'd email him my list of items, and those were what we would address the next day. And we'd make this a daily call for maybe the first 30 to 60 days. And by then, I had my feet underneath me. We kind of knew what we were doing, and we could drop that call frequency down to maybe once a week, and then once every other week.

If I needed him sooner than that, he was always there. But we sort of just did a phased line type approach to it. It took us about six months. We finally had our entire database loaded in. But by then we were so busy with the other workspaces, we just kept going.

KATELYN WILSON: Yeah. So what Boa didn't have because of the collaborative effort and the fact that they had so much daily meeting and project management was a project plan. So larger implementations typically have a project plan that we put together, and this is, again, outlining here's exactly what we're doing.

If you want something outside of this project plan, then we're going to have to document it. It's just a way to make sure everyone's on the same page. We all know what we're getting out of this system. So that if implementation time comes around, or go live time comes around and something's not done that's in this project plan, then it's very documented, and it can be accounted for and performed.

So Dave went through the Boa implementation strategy, which I think the biggest thing to take away from that is the fact that they did an agile approach to their implementation, that they went for the quick win so that they could get ROI quickly. So implementing their platforms that were lower use, but could get them using Fusion Lifecycle quickly.

So for some customers, that might be we want to start managing tasks in Fusion Lifecycle while we have it being implemented so that we can kind of get some reporting going on, get people used to the system, and then keep adding more and more into it. And so once you do your mobilization, you then kind of move on to actually implementing Fusion Lifecycle. So, again, often structured as a phased approach. The goal is to get you guys using the system as quickly as possible.

There's sometimes instances where the strategy or the workspaces that are necessary don't allow for that, or we really need this ERP integration in order for us to say Fusion Lifecycle is successful. And so sometimes we don't always get to do those easy, quick wins, but that's really the goal is to do a quick win, get you guys your ROI quickly.

And Dave kind of talked about their implementation strategy. And it's really the implementation strategy, at least in terms of the phases, that goes for everyone, which is planning what you want Fusion Lifecycle to be, building it out-- so what we typically call implementation-- test iterations. So test iterations-- I can't stress this one enough-- test iterations are important, and this includes developing test cases. So thoroughly vetting out the system to determine, is it doing what I need it to do?

So I just did an implementation recently for a customer in California, and we documented test cases very detailed, which was things like you need to go to this workspace. Click the plus sign. Try to save it without filling in data. Does it prompt you to fill in the correct data at the appropriate time? So really get detailed into that because once you've tested it thoroughly, you're going to have a better outcome with Fusion Lifecycle. You're going to realize the misses up front.

And you might also realize that what you wanted to design doesn't actually work with what you want your process to be. So it may have sounded really great at the beginning, or it may have been what you needed then, but perhaps your business has slightly changed or you realized a better way to do it. And so testing it out is really important.

And then after testing, we'll do training, so train the users on how to use Fusion Lifecycle, how they use dashboards, how email should come in, how they should be creating records and editing records. And then from there, you go live. And this can be phased, so it could be we're going to input items and [? bombs ?] and change orders, go through this process. Now, we're going to move on to quality and go through these processes.

And so responsibilities throughout this. As an implementer, we developed the project plan, if applicable, for more collaborative efforts of smaller projects. That might just be more of project management.

We also like to develop ticketing systems. So the ticketing system, or what we sometimes just call user acceptance testing feedback, is a standard that we've put in place of implementing a workspace for testing so that when a user can come into Fusion Lifecycle and say, I can't transition this workflow, or I transitioned it, but it allowed me to transition without filling in a data field that should be required. So I'm going to create a record that tracks that so we have a history of here's everything that we've updated in the system.

Maybe it's not a bug. Maybe it's an enhancement request. We have a place that we can document it. We're trying to put into place process management and avoid this email communication and loss of data. So why not put that stuff in Fusion Lifecycle?

So what do you do once you go live? So obviously, we went with Fusion Lifecycle, or a PLM system, because we wanted to improve our processes and improve the way that we do business. But we also have to continually improve. So it's just part of manufacturing and part of growing businesses, even growing ourselves, and being [? lean ?] is continuous improvement and questioning what we're doing, and why we're doing it, and how can we do it better.

There's always a way to do it better. If you don't think so, you're wrong. There's always something that you can improve, and that's just the way that this stuff goes.

So post go live, continuously improving, finding ways you could have done it better, making modifications. This is something I think Dave and I talk about almost weekly is hey, Katelyn, I need to change the way we're doing this. We've gotten some feedback. Or we weren't collecting data we realized we should have been collecting all along.

So we're continuously modifying the implementation. It's not always big changes. It might just be, hey, I need to add in an extra data field. Or I need to remove a data field, which is this one that I talk to Dave about, too, which sometimes we're not great at is questioning why we're putting data in the system and why we're doing the things we're doing. Oftentimes, we'll get it caught in a loop of, I've always done it this way so I'm going to keep doing it, and not question ourselves.

And so I challenge you every day, but especially if you're implementing, to look at why am I putting this data in the system? Am I reporting on it? If I'm not reporting on it, or it's not necessary for something in my process, why is it going in the system?

And I had a clients who did three implementations. It took their third implementation to realize this and to have a successful project was to really question what they were doing and why. Because they ended up with two very complicated implementations prior to really questioning why do they do what they do.

Now, they've been live for, I think, two years with their third implementation. It's going great. They're constantly improving because they question why all the time. They have the strong project management and project sponsor to do that.

But then also comes expansion. So we're not done yet. We want to keep using Fusion Lifecycle. We really want to make it an enterprise solution.

And so Boa has a really, really fun story for this one. Sometimes expansion comes where we don't think it will. So tell us a little bit about your feelings on bitcoin, Dave.

DAVID CLIFTON: We all came to work one morning and found out that one of the systems that we had not planned on replacing with Fusion-- a collaborative software package called Bugs Project Manager-- had been hacked overnight. We were completely locked out of the system, and the system was held for ransom for 5,000 bitcoin.