Evolving Autodesk Fusion Manage: Unpacking a Year of Product Progress

AMITABH VERMA: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the session on evolution of Fusion Manage. I'm Amitabh Verma, and I, along with Robert Hartmann, together we will unpack the progress we have made over a year. Quick introductions before we go further. I'm Amitabh Verma, product manager for Fusion Manage. I've been with Autodesk for three years, and I'm based out of Detroit area. I'll hand over to Robert for a quick introductions.

ROBERT HARTMANN: Yeah, thank you, Amitabh. My name is Robert. I'm a solutions engineer here at Autodesk for almost two years, with a main focus on our Cloud, PDM, and PLM solutions.

AMITABH VERMA: Thank you, Robert. Moving on, I'll just pause here for a couple of seconds for you guys to read the safe harbor statement. The summary is that some of the future capabilities, which we talk about here, may not make the product as per the expected timelines, and therefore, purchasing decisions should not be made based on the things which we present here today.

So this is going to be our agenda for today. We will briefly discuss about the strategic importance of Fusion Manage for Autodesk and how this is strategically aligned with the overall Fusion Industry Cloud vision. Then we go and talk about the areas which we focused on over the last 12 months, mainly modernizing the Fusion Manage stack, the productivity improvements. And then Robert will walk us through additional business processes, which we plan to introduce over the next several weeks, months.

And in the end, briefly, we will talk about what is next for Fusion Manage, what are the areas which we plan to focus on over the next several months. So let's dive in.

Fusion Industry Cloud-- that is something we are working on. It's manufacturing end-to-end cloud-based solution for manufacturers and their supply chain. It strives to unify data, technologies, and workflows across the entire product lifecycle, connecting everyone involved in the product development process, regardless of the discipline.

Now, Fusion is an amalgamation of different technologies which Autodesk acquired over many years. We started with incorporating mechanical design, electrical, electronic design, simulation, CAM, generative design into the Fusion ecosystem.

And the way Autodesk has been working through this is that we take those technology pieces, break them into components, improve their scalability, performance, resiliency, and then integrate them into a cohesive experience for our users. This is one of the differentiators we have with Fusion Industry Cloud in the market-- cohesive user experience.

And what could be the next step in our journey, the next logical step, right? So we are going to focus on Fusion Manage as our premium PLM Cloud Solution, which is part of this overall Fusion Industry Cloud strategy. And the next step would be that we bring in the PLM and PDM data management capabilities, operations, and shop floor management capabilities into the Industry Cloud.

And how this helps us is that this will not only help us to provide a unified and cohesive experience for the users, but it will help us to bring in advanced automation capabilities, AI capabilities. And above all, it will help us in streaming all the workflow, or streamlining all the workflow. And this is our shot at breaking the proverbial silo, the barriers to collaboration with different departments, different disciplines. And we are pretty confident with how we are going that we will be able to achieve this.

Now you see that here there is an Autodesk Platform Service layer. So Autodesk Platform Services, along with manufacturing data model APIs, Fusion Manage APIs, and Operations APIs, we support a completely open ecosystem. And these allows our customers and partners to build integrations and UI extensions which can optimally support their use cases.

You guys are not tied on to using the product as we ship, right. You have the flexibility to use the Platform Services to build something which optimally supports your use cases. And this is one mechanism by which you can surface the relevant data for your users in ways that are ideal that are helpful for your business.

So with this brief overview about Fusion in general and Fusion Industry Cloud, we jump into things which we worked on over the past several months. And these are the areas in focus. We will spend most of our time here today.

So modernizing Fusion Manage has been our goal. We started with updating the tech stack. We have worked recently on Cloud OS v3 upgrade. Security and vulnerabilities are addressed and aligned to Autodesk Trust and Compliance Guideline.

Modern Interface has a bunch of new things which we have added to it, mostly to ensure that the customers who are still on Classic, they can come over to Modern. We can improve adoption.

One of the things which we have done is we have been exclusively focused on adding new capabilities to Modern Interface. So our Classic customers are missing on some of these things if they are not on Modern.

And there are a bunch of capabilities we have added to make our users more productive and efficient. We will double click on some of these things, including classification search.

We have added support for additional business processes. A couple of months ago, we updated our default configuration to include ideas management, requirements management, and supplier collaboration. Robert will lead us through some of the additional business processes, which have been planned, which we have been working on, and which are planned to be rolled out over next several months.

OK, getting into how we have been trying to modernize the interface here, I did briefly touch upon alignment with Autodesk trust and security standards. Autodesk embarked on the journey to modernize Fusion Manage a couple of years ago.

The goal was, again, to ensure that we have a cohesive user experience aligned with Autodesk User Interface Guidelines and a look and feel which is consistent with modern applications. And as we progressed in the journey, our development effort became completely focused on modern UI for new features and product improvements.

We want to ensure that all our customers who are on Classic today moved to the Modern Interface. And that way, they will be able to make use of all the enhancements that went into the product. Customers who are in Classic are not able to reap all the benefits of the rich capabilities that are available only in Modern Interface.

And we are ensuring that no customer is left behind. All customers move to Modern. And we have been reaching out to them, prodding them, helping them. And whenever there are concerns, we are working with them to ensure that we can address those concerns and remove the barriers.

So as part of that barrier removal, there were some capabilities which were only available in Classic. Those are now either available already on Modern or we plan to get to them really, really soon.

So one of such capabilities is Action Notification. Action Notification is to send out emails at different stages of the workflow. So you can configure when a email is sent out, at what stage of the workflow, to which user group, or to which user. And this can be configured for transitions and states, and email goes out to those users.

Now this is really helpful when you are trying to collaborate across the board between different departments and disciplines. And say, for example, once a problem report is approved, the next set of approved for review and approve for change or action, next set of disciplines might have to get involved into managing that or taking it forward. And that's what this helps with.

I have a short recorded demo here. I'll get started here with the demo. What I have here is that I have a problem report where the Action Notification tab is missing. So this admin is going ahead and configuring Action Notification tab for a specific role for a problem report read/write role.

And in this case, they are taking the granular permissions which make up the action notification and adding it with this role. In this case, my user, which I'm using here, is part of that group, part of that permission group.

So now here my user is creating a problem report, Brake Caliper Failure. And when I come here, I see that there is an Action Notification tab. I see that there is a workflow here.

And at various stages of this workflow, I can choose to go ahead and create a notification out of the Submit stage or when the workflow reaches the review state, or when it reaches the technical analysis to inform different user groups or different users about their next series of actions. I'll continue playing here.

So one time at the Action Notification tab, I can add different event types. So I can add a transition and event type transition. And for that specific transition, I can add a group of users who needs to be notified. In this case, I have picked up an action notification receiver group and myself.

And there could be also even type state. So in this case, when you reach the technical analysis state, there would be a notification sent out. Once this is set up, as this problem report goes through the business process, we will move it along the workflow.

And once it moves to the specific state in the workflow, so Submit-- at Submit, we had a notification configured. And at this time, we will have this notification coming through. So this is a cool feature to support inter-departmental communication and collaboration.

And the next thing I want to talk about is component sourcing management, how we can have suppliers, manufacturers, quotes, and cost rollup and how it can facilitate what if analysis of different types. So the capabilities which come under the purview of sourcing management is being able to manage suppliers, manufacture part number information for a given component. We can manage the logistical and procurement information related to the quote, quantity, lead time, unit cost for each supplied part. And then there is a way to set up a quote as default so that we can roll up the cost information on the BOM and facilitate some kind of what-if analysis.

This also allows a supplier-centric view where I can go to a supplier and see all the components which are supplied by the supplier. It supports being able to add custom sourcing fields. So there are some system sourcing fields which comes out of the box. But then you can go ahead and extend it, add your own custom field which are relevant for you.

And all of this is controlled by permission, very granular permission. The permission to add a supplier is different from permission to add a quote. So you can bring different departments, disciplines, and assign them granular permission to manage this.

Before we go there, I just wanted to talk a little bit about suppliers. We have a supplier workspace which is used for approving, evaluating suppliers or vendors. It allows very detailed supplier management, and it can hold various information.

So we have a current state of the supplier. Supplier can be active, under review, can have an audit going on. And there is this workflow which can, again, be configured based on your business needs. It can become more detailed.

So in this case, we have current state of suppliers. This is supplier onboarding workflow-- how you get the suppliers, what certifications you need from them before they become part of your ecosystem.

And there could be, if the suppliers have some nonconformance associated with them, those are surfaced in this other tab Nonconformance tab. You can also have the certification information or documentation for the supplier added to the Attachment tab.

So now I'll switch over to demo of the sourcing capability. So here I am on an Item tab, and I have a list of suppliers who could potentially supply this item. And for each of these suppliers, so I can expand and get to the specific quote. So in this case, a specific quote from Mouser Electronics was set as default.

And when I go to Assembly, which is using that specific component, I can see how the component cost contributes to the overall rollup of the end item here.

And user can go ahead and make one of the other quotes as default. The system does prompt the user to cascade that impact of that change of the default quote across all parent assemblies. And in this case, we do that. And the new quote is set as default.

Now if we go back to the BOM and reload the BOM again, so the new default cost comes into play. And the total cost, again, for the end item reflects that new quote. So it's a quick way to do what-if analysis.

In this case, we are just showing how a supplier can be onboarded. This is a more detailed workflow than what I showed earlier for supplier. And once the supplier is approved, then only the supplier is available on the Sourcing tab for an item.

So in this case, now this user is adding a supplier. So Active tag was just now approved. We went through really fast with that approval process, but that could be as detailed as you want with all certification needs.

So in this case, we added supplier, and now we will add a quote for that supplier. And there could be multiple courts for the same supplier, depending on the quality with different lead time and unit costs.

So in this case, we added this new supplier, a couple of quotes for the supplier. And now we are going to change the default to one of the quotes from the new supplier, and again cascade the things to the parent assembly. And going back to the BOM, again, because we added a new default, the BOM tab will refresh to reflect this new cost. So, a quick and easy way to do a bunch of cost analysis based on the vendor and different quotes from the vendor and the timeline.

Here you see that on the Supplier tab, on Supplier, we have a Supplier Item tab. This is not a great example, but you can if you have a supplier who is supplying hundreds of parts. This is one place where you can see all that information, view all that information, along with some of the other quality details.

OK, so apart from these two, right-- Action Notification and sourcing-- which were blockers, we worked on a couple of other modern adoption blockers. Now we support edit of the relationship directionality, so that is supported.

We also support a way to display related attachments in the BOM tab and in the BOM export. So that is available. You can hover over the attachment column here and it will show the attachments which are related to that specific component in the BOM.

OK, so now we'll switch gears to talk about productivity improvements. And we will start with classification. Classification Search is something which we are working on. It's not out. We plan to put it into preview in next couple of weeks. So it is still in staging. So there will be the demo, which I'll share here is from the internal staging environment.

Now, classification is one of the most important capabilities in a PLM system. It elevates the value of PLM. Because part reuse, promoting part reuse is going to be really, really helpful for an organization. And it can directly impact the cost of the product which you ship out.

Now there are many classification benefits. Because of part reuse, you don't have to redesign. You don't have to spend time redesigning stuff which you have already. So being able to search for that component or for that part which you already have when you are trying-- or search for that exact match, or even for similar components, that would be a great benefit.

Because you already have your supply chains and compliance-related requirements set up for that specific component. And if you can reuse it, you cut costs from all those additional processes which you would have to take care of. And you, in a way, promote some kind of standardization by using standard components.

So now, we will go through this and it will show how we can search for items. There would be a combined search where we would be able to use item properties and also classification properties to surface specific components which adhere to that classification.

And again, we can also use this as some kind of a classification browser. I can go to a specific class and show everything which is related to that class. So it would be interesting. And overall, the goal is for you to be able to derive more value for your PLM.

So this is the new search page out here. In this case, there is a panel, workspace panel. You have seen before, but now we have added a workspace panel.

And there is a classification panel, which shows the classification tree. You can expand the tree. You can use these filters to get to a specific thing you are looking to. It will expand the tree and show you that specific thing.

And there you could get to those specific properties related to that class. So here we have a bunch of properties. And I can filter based on those properties. So the results reflect based on this filter.

And now, apart from some of these things, we also have-- I mean, you can go to this leaf node here. We are on a leaf node, but then we can also go and get the properties of a higher level class in the hierarchy. We can go and look at hardware and maybe filter it out based on those properties which are at a parent level. So if I pick up something here, it will actually filter out everything which is below the tree based on that specific value for a parent.

The other interesting thing is the pick list. We are able to surface the pick list values onto this pick list. So if there is a pick list, you don't have to type in anything. We provide the pick list.

And this is something we will carry over to the workspace view as well, so that you don't have to remember what the pick list value was. It is surfaced by the system itself.

Now, one other thing, if you see here on the side, the Classification, there are tags which are getting generated, not showing up really well. But there are tags which show up there. And for each of the tags-- let me try it again.

So here, so finish equal to chrome plated. We are looking at washers. So that class, finish equal to chrome plated, material, equal to stainless steel. Those are tags which you can easily see.

Even if you collapse these sections out here, you can easily see what is your classification search criteria. And as today, we will also support a full query mode here. You would be able to go to full query mode and type in more complex queries, which may not be possible by clicking through all these details.

So the documentation and more details about this will follow. As our process, we will release this preview. And then after four weeks, after that, we will get this into production.

Now, there are other productivity improvements which we did over last year or so. We added effectivity date in script. So now you can manipulate the effectivity dates from within your scripts.

The loading performance on the change order for the Affected Items tab, that has been improved so that you can deal with hundreds of affected items at one go. It used to be sluggish. Now, we are continuing to work on performance improvement.

Release in Place is another capability, which we added recently. What this allows is that you can deactivate a release version of a Revision Control item without incrementing the version number.

So if there is no form, fit, and function that changed, you are not forced to [? approve ?] the revision, in case you want to. And it's all change control. So you will use a change order to deactivate something. And then you can use another change order to bring it back, activate it back again without a versioning increment.

And then you can track also effectivity dates, the time period within which it was deactivated and, again, when it got activated. So it's a cool feature if you have that kind of a problem of activating, deactivating, and upward versioning things without form feature function change, this would be a good thing for you.

My outstanding work is now much more configurable. You can sort, you can filter, you can resize. I'll have a snapshot of that menu bookmarking, if you are getting the number of options. Workspaces are getting confusing. You can bookmark your frequently used menu items and quickly access them.

So this is how my outstanding work looks today. You can filter each of these. These columns have a filter. You can filter on specific workspaces, on search, on descriptor, or state or date or due date. And makes it much more manageable when you have a lot of items coming into your inbox and demanding attention.

Menu bookmark-- if you bookmark something, a new menu option appears under the hamburger menu, here, Bookmarks. And based on things which you had bookmarked, it shows up here. And then you can quickly jump to them instead of navigating through workspaces.

I'll hand it over now to Robert to talk about the business processes and templates which we are introducing.

ROBERT HARTMANN: Thank you, Amitabh, for the introduction of what has changed in the last year within Fusion Manage, like great features that came to the product in recent times.

So what I would like to talk about in the next section of this presentation is the additional business processes that we have added to the Template Library within Fusion Manage. And some of you might still know this under the name of the App Store.

So the templates that we have introduced or that we are currently in the way of introducing are the ones that you see on screen right here. And in case you might wonder, now if you go into a template library inside of your tenant, you might not find them as for now.

And the reason for this is very simple, because these are currently only available in sandbox trial and partner environments, because the templates that I will introduce in a bit are currently still in development and documentation. Therefore, it's still missing. And this is the last bit that we need to be able to release them to you in the near future.

But in case any of the templates that we will talk about now, they pique your interest, reach out to your partner or reach out to us directly, and then we can figure something out. Or just make use of your sandbox and download the templates there.

Quick disclaimer-- as like similar to all templates in the Template Library, if you download, let's say, something from the Template Library, it does not update or like change something in your existing environment, it will always create a new instance, even if you install it twice, and so on.

So with this disclaimer aside, let's jump into the first template that I would like to talk about. And the first template is the First Article Inspection Report. And this is very simple. It's a single workspace with a workflow and the properties that you see on screen.

And you might also think like, well, we already do have the quality inspection and the quality inspection plans. Why is there a need for first article inspection?

And the reason for this is we had some customer engagements where they are actually asking for a dedicated workspace for this first article inspection in case you have a new supplier that you want to work with, the new products that you want to bring to the market, or just simple prototypes that you want to check on.

And by having a dedicated workspace for this, it makes it way easier to compare each instance of this, like the first inspection that you do for every bit and every piece, every supplier that you work with. And by having the dedicated process, it also allows for better tracking of all of the data that you put into PLM. So this would be our first addition to the quality-related updates.

The next update for the quality part is the 8D report. And I'm pretty sure most of you that are doing 8D reports nowadays already, and also our customers, they're doing it-- like either in Excel, Word, or different tool, or maybe even manually on a piece of paper-- but we realized in the past there is a need to do this in a PLM solution, or in our PLM solution. And the best PLM solution to use it for is a cloud PLM solution, because it's very easy to get all the stakeholders that are needed for an 8D report into the same system, talk about the same data, the same base for decision making, and so on.

And the 8D report you see in here, similar to the one that you have seen before with the First Article Inspection Report, single workspace with its dedicated workflow and a set of properties. And it might look different to the 8D report that you use nowadays. But again, it's Fusion Manage, feel free to configure it to your liking so it matches the way you handle your 8D reports. But I think this 8D report template is a good baseline to start with your own configuration or your own version of the 8D report.

The next and the last bit of the Quality section would be the Spare Parts Request. And with our Cloud PLM Solution, we already offer a lot of options to our service technicians, or the people that are out in the field-- for example, maintenance or other projects.

And with a dedicated Spare Parts Request workspace, we want to bring this to the next level by allowing service technicians, or people that do the maintenance for your machines, to create these spare parts requests directly inside of Fusion Manage.

And don't get me wrong, the quotation and all these things. They should still happen with your ERP system, so connection might make sense for better data tracking.

But the general process and being able to link all of this information to your items, to all of the other information that you have in your PLM system is extremely beneficial, not only to you, but all of your engineers, your quality department, and so on, because you can directly track and connect it with your item.

Like, how many spare parts have been requested? What parts are prone to error? Where should we improve our machines or our constructions? And it just allows for better decision-making in the future and to update your products.

The next template is the Items workspace. And now you might wonder, wait, Items workspace, we already do have something that is called Items and BOMs, or even the Vault Items and BOMs workspace. And this is like a combination of these two.

So we thought it doesn't make sense to differentiate between regular items and BOMs, and Vault items and BOMs. So we made it a single Items workspace, and we added a dedicated PDM data section.

And as you can see in here, we added this for Vault and Upchain, so both of our PDM solutions so that you can directly see inside of PLM what is the current status of this engineering data inside of PDM, who designed it, when was it released, where is it saved, et cetera, et cetera. But furthermore, we also updated the Classification Summary so that we can make better use of the Classification Search that Amitabh was talking about before.

And then we also added some more data, so everything around procurement or the quality inspection to just have more information on your items so it can act like a hub for all of the information that you want to get from inside of Fusion Manage.

Lastly, we also added some fields dedicated to sustainability. So you could do some BOM rollups, check out your CO2 footprint for your assembly compared with previous revisions, and see how has your improvement been.

Lastly, for the Items Workspace, in case you make use of the power PLM tool from coolOrange, this Items Workspace configuration is already aligned with their connector as well. So if you make use of the latest version of powerPLM, you do not really have to do any further adjustments. It will work from the get go. So this would be about the Items Workspace.

The next template that I would like to talk about is pick list values. And maybe, again, you will ask yourself, why is there a template for pick list values. There is already a pick list value or a pick list functionality inside of Fusion Manage.

And this pick list functionality is perfect for everything that is static. So if you just want to have a simple yes/no, or one, two, three pick lists. For this, there is no need to have a dedicated pick list workspace.

But sometimes you want to have more dynamic pick lists or you want to have cascading features inside of your pick list. And this is where this dedicated workspace comes in. So it doesn't support a specific process inside of Fusion Manage. It's more or less to be used in various workspaces.

So the way this works, I think it's the easiest if we just check it out live in the system. So I will go into my Fusion Manage environment. And now we are in our Pick List Value workspace.

And as you can see in here, we have a list name, value 1, 2, 3, and so on. So let's for example, open up the site Seattle. And the way this Pick List Value workspace works is that we have these dedicated values that we could use for cascading. We have a list name that we can burst, which would be our first-level filter. But we can also have additional filters later on. So for example, we have sites for certain groups or for certain departments in our organization, and sites for different departments in our organization.

Another great feature for this Pick List Value is that we can also enable or disable certain pick list values. So in case, for example, if you take your existing pick list and you delete a value from this, it will also be deleted from each and every item inside of your Fusion Manage environment. So it's very difficult to update or change existing data.

With a Pick List Value workspace, if we just simply like disable, for example, Seattle as a site, it would just not be available for future references. But all of the existing data won't be manipulated.

And the way this looks like in the administration of the system is pretty much similar to the way you are handling this nowadays. So if I take the site, for example, and now I'm in my problem report, and I click Edit here, we can see Data Type Pick List, similar to it as before. But now it already gets a little bit different.

So in our Pick List Options, we can see there is a new, in our case, Best Practice Naming with a PLV for Pick List Values. So if I click on Edit in here, we will see, It's a custom lookup for the Pick List Values Workspace. And because we are looking at the site, our list name that we filter is also sites.

So it works very much straightforward, but we now can make use of all the sites that we have defined in our Pick List Value workspace. And we can also further on add further or additional sites in the process. And we do not need to be administrators of the system.

So you could enable certain groups of users in your system to be able to add certain values, or values to this Pick List Value workspace. But they do not need to be administrators to manipulate the pick list or to enhance it further on.

And I mentioned the cascading feature as well. And if we take a look at the Root Cause Category and the Type here, for example, it works in a similar way. So we have our Pick List Value for the Problem Root Causes.

So if I edit this in here, we can see custom lookup for the Pick List Values workspace. But in this case, we filter on the List Name, Problem Root Causes. And we do not take the Single Selection feature for the Item Descriptor link. We will take the value 1.

So if I jump back to our Pick List Value workspace and one of these problem root causes, for example, we see that the first value, in this case, is the Problem Root Cause category. And the second value is the Problem Root Cause Type.

So we did it the same way in here with our filtered pick list. Our category is the value 1. And then logically, our Root Cause Type is Problem Root Causes, same pick list, just the value 2.

And with this, we believe it's a great addition to having more dynamic pick lists inside of Fusion Manage to just address certain use cases.

And another decent feature with this functionality is that you can also make use of the Import functionality of Fusion Manage. So what case you have an Excel file with all of your pick list values, you can just simply import all of those and make use of it in Fusion Manage. So this would be for the Pick List Values workspace.

The next section would be about our Project Management Solutions. And you probably know and love NPI already with this phase gate approach where you fulfill all of the tasks in a certain phase. As soon as the tasks have been completed, you will jump to the next gate. It will be reviewed, approved, and then you will go to your next phase with its dedicated tasks and the dedicated timeline that is there from the start.

And this works for a lot of customers already. But in recent times we had some engagements where our customers were demanding a more dynamic approach, and in some ways also like an agile approach to project management. And therefore we have introduced two new solutions to the Template Library.

And the first one is the Engineering Project Management. And the Engineering Project Management itself, it has some similarities to the NPI Project, but it's also different or very different in some other areas.

And the biggest difference is that we do not have a phase gate approach. Like the NPI, it's more like a milestone-based approach. And we also do not have dedicated tasks that control all of our milestones, as we can handle most of these tasks in parallel. And we are also able to make use of the Gantt chart to manipulate our agenda or our timeline.

And again, I think it's the best to showcase this live. So I will go back to my Fusion Manage environment and to our Engineering Projects workspace. And in our case, I will just create a new workspace entry. And let's say we want to create an engineering project, in our case.

Again, we need to select a kickoff date, which I will set to today. And our template is the Standard Template. So far, it's quite similar to the NPI, because in there you also need to select certain mandatory fields as well as a template.

But if we go down a bit to our Project Schedule section, we can see that we can predefine certain milestones for our engineering project. And for example, let's say that we should finish milestone 1 someday in October. And let's say, for example, milestone 2 should be at the end of November, or close to the end of November. And the rest I will just leave it as it is so it can be copied from the template.

And with this, I hit Save. And what happens now in the background is that all of these milestones will be created, but also all of these tasks. So this is also something that is quite different to the NPI project where the phases and the tasks that belong to the phases are still in planning. In our case, they are already created from the get go, so we can make use of a feature that we will see you in a bit.

But before we jump into this, we can see our activities have been created. There are some auto starts if we create or if we start our project, and like the certain durations.

And for the first two, we can see that these are the dates that I have selected from the date picker that I've used before. And the other ones, they come from the template. So if we take a look at the template, for example, it's very, very odd, quite different to the NPI template.

So we define some project team members that could work on our tasks, and we can also define some milestones with some offset for the days if there should be like some auto starts when we create the project. And we can also predefine certain assignees for our activities in here.

But the main difference compared to the NPI will be in the Template Activities, so in our Activity Template here. So instead of defining how long a duration should be for a certain task and have a predecessor that needs to be fulfilled before we go into the next task, we have it a little bit more dynamic in this regard.

So we can obviously give it a title, description, priority, and so on. But the important bit is the Start After and the Finish Until section here. So the difference between this and NPIs, that an NPI task is always dedicated to a certain phase. But within the Engineering Project, for example, we can say that a task just has a start and an end date.

So we can say that these tasks should start after the kickoff, so after our project has been created. And they should finish until a certain milestone.

And in this case, it's like M1, M2, M2, M3, and so on. But it could also be, for example, that provide functional specification. It should also start after we reach milestone 1, but we have time until milestone 3 to finish this, for example.

And the way this looks in production, I will show you in a bit. So we go back to our Engineering Project. And let's take a look at the status. And again, in here, way simpler compared to the NPI because, in case we need it, we have an approval in here. But because I'm an administrator in the system and nothing has been selected, I can simply begin my project.

And with this, we initiated our project. So the task where we have selected on the landing page, that should be initiated or the activities that should start. They will start for notifications to the person, if we have to find someone, and so on.

But now we come to the biggest or the best feature of the Engineering Project Management, in my opinion. And this is something that one of our customers actually has requested. And therefore, everything that you see right now is from a current customer engagement that we have.

And what this customer was asking for is why do we not make use of the Gantt chart to actually define the agenda or define the timeline for our project. And we thought, yeah, we should actually do it this way. So we configured it the way you see it now.

And before you ask, we could have implemented this for the NPI, but then it would break some of the logic or the way that an NPI should work with the phase gate approach. So we thought, let's make it a different template.

So what I could do now is I could click Edit and I could adjust, for example, let's say, the market study. It's a little bit shorter. And the initial concept, it starts a little bit later in the timeline. I could also move around the milestone, different activities in here. But in our case, I will leave it as it is.

So we'll hit Save, and now nothing happens. Because, as for now, this is just for the project manager to take a second look and think, OK, does this work. Yeah, it looks good.

So the next action would be to update all of my team members. So this is the important bit. We should update everyone that was involved in this process. So we send our update schedule and notifications to inform everyone that is relevant for this project to be updated with the new timeline. So in case one of your tasks have been adjusted or your timeline has been rescheduled, you should get an information about this.

And the way this would look like is if we go into our Email section here, we will see that there has been a schedule change for Engineering Project that we have just created. So we could see that our Activity Market Study, it has a new start and a new completion date. The progress stays the same.

And for our initial concept, we can see that only the start date has changed, but the completion date also stayed the same. And we can see who performed this action. And we can also reach out to, in this case, myself, as I'm the project manager of this project, to ask, OK, why has this change happened, and so on. And we think this is a very, very great addition to our project management capabilities inside of Fusion Manage.

And the last bit would be the Innovation Project Management. And this is similar to the Engineering Project Management, not a replacement for the NPI. You could see it as an addition to the existing version of Project Management that we have inside of the system.

And the Innovation Project Management is a little bit simpler. So you do not have a very complex Gantt chart or like a phase gate approach, no complex workflow. It's very much straightforward. You just have an activity backlog. And you work in sprint based. So you can have weekly, bi-weekly, and you just do certain tasks.

And again, let's just take a look at what this looks like. So I create a new Innovation Project. And let's say, for example, we want to have a new marketing event.

So we say title, Marketing Event, sprint duration, two weeks. And if I want to, I can also determine a certain team. In this case, I will just set myself as a team member. And let's say, for example, Selena should be updated on everything that happens inside of this Innovation Project. But with this, we are more or less ready to go.