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Putting Vendors to Work While Keeping Them at Arm's Reach

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Description

Data security and collaboration with vendors can be challenging to balance, but we have been able to effectively manage these concerns by capitalizing on Vault software's project sync. This technology has allowed us to control the flow of information we share, maintain a secure environment, and simplify our vendor collaboration efforts. During this session, we will delve into how we implemented Vault Project Sync to improve collaboration with vendors, discussing the obstacles we faced, how we overcame them, and the feedback we received from end users.

Principaux enseignements

  • Understand our vendor collaboration security changes.
  • Understand design collaboration workflows.
  • Understand usability by vendors
  • Learn how we implemented a vendor collaboration workflow.

Intervenants

  • Avatar de Joshua Wilson
    Joshua Wilson
    I am Josh Wilson, the Fusion 360 Manage Administrator at Bridgestone Americas. With a focus on data management and flow within the Autodesk Manufacturing industry, I have specialized in this field since 2011. My expertise lies in utilizing the Autodesk Vault vertical to ensure efficient data handling. Throughout my career, I have effectively implemented Vault at multiple companies, dealing with diverse levels of complexity. My primary objectives revolve around optimizing data flow, starting from the initial conception stage and extending all the way to the manufacturing and maintenance handoff. To achieve this, I rely on the powerful combination of Fusion 360 Manage and Autodesk Vault Professional to streamline the entire process.
  • Carlos Caminos
    Carlos Caminos is a seasoned BIM Professional and the Manager of the Asset Data Management Team at Bridgestone Americas. In his role, he plays a crucial part in coordinating and optimizing the flow of data from the design and engineering stages all the way through to manufacturing. Carlos is responsible for implementing software solutions, providing training, and establishing efficient workflows within the organization. With an impressive track record spanning over 25 years, Carlos has extensive experience in utilizing Autodesk software. His proficiency extends across a range of tools, including AEC Collections, Product Design & Manufacturing Collection, Vault Professional, and Autodesk Construction Cloud software. Carlos's expertise encompasses practical applications of Autodesk, Inc. products within the architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing industries.
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      Transcript

      JOSH WILSON: Hi, and welcome to putting vendors to work while keeping them at arm's reach. Give a little introduction here. My name is Josh Wilson. I am the BAMM Asset Administrator at Bridgestone Americas, which means I am the Fusion 360 Manager Administrator.

      Just to give a little bit of background on my history of work. I've been in my career a 12 plus years in working in data management and helping other companies configure Vault and other data solutions for streamlining Inventor and other CAD data processes from start to finish while managing data solutions.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Hi my name is Carlos Caminos. So I'm the manager of Vault and Asset Management. I have 10 plus years of experience with BIM technology, plant design, and mechanical engineering. To give you some more background on that, I've been involved in several industries, water industry, energy industry, and the manufacturing industry. I've been involved in implementing Autodesk products probably close to 20, 25 years now.

      JOSH WILSON: For today's learning objectives, we are going to be going over and hope you understand different design collaboration workflows working externally within your company, understand usability of these workflows by outsourced vendors, and learn how we implemented a vendor collaboration workflow at Bridgestone.

      How things were connected before is we did have a Citrix VDI solution. This solution was very, very slow. It was underpowered systems with a lot of people accessing these different solutions-- or these different machines. These machines did require us to have domain accounts. We also used Windows authentication within Vault Professional to authenticate those users to the Vault server piece.

      Within that, we had to create different user groups and user roles for these users. And then, we had a different structure and hierarchy of folders and permissions that we had to manage those folder permissions within the Vault itself.

      The other thing with this is it did consume our additional licenses because we hosted these solutions. So we had client licenses for our CAD software and then we had licenses for our Vault software.

      Now, with changing times, we did have some IT security changes come into place. Our IT really wanted to put a more strict vendor policy in place. We also had transitioned our Vault systems to AWS. Now, with these, we did have to make some changes. We did give some interim VPN access to select users and select vendors just to keep the ball rolling and keep things moving within the company to make sure projects didn't fall behind deadlines.

      Now, with these strict policies, it forced us to start looking for another solution. As we started looking through other solutions, these were the top three solutions that we did come up with. First one being our existing Citrix VDI solution. Was there a way that we could keep using it? Did we just need to spend a little bit more money and beef up these machines?

      Or could we look at other options? Vault Gateway was just released a couple of years ago and it seemed like a really great solution. Also, Vault Project Sync. Is this a viable solution to get these workflows working with vendors? So let's take a deeper dive into our pros and cons of each one of these solutions.

      First up being our Citrix VDI solution. The pro was it was already configured. We didn't have to do anything else other than maybe buy some more hardware and beef up that solution to streamline and help our vendors with their engineering and design processes.

      We also have higher security with these because we control these machines. I mean, it's nothing more than what we already have now and our IT department is already able to control these machines and what security if an antivirus is on these machines.

      Now, let's talk about some cons on this. One, they were slow. They were a slow machine. So we would have had to invest a lot of money into getting a VDI solution built up for these users.

      Next was it was a complex management folder structure for us to do. Us as data management administrators, we were constantly going through changing security roles within Vault, adding folder permissions, and then, changing folder permissions kicks off property re-indexes within Vault.

      So that's a time that the Vault really gets bogged down and we don't have all that time. So we had to try and work on those over the weekend so that Vault had time to crunch and get those changes in place.

      And then, the last thing with that was vendors didn't like using them. They hated having to remote into these machines, fighting over access for when they needed to get stuff done because we just didn't have enough.

      Our next solution there is the Vault Gateway. It looked like a great solution. Simple setup, simplified connection for our vendors. We just had to set up this Forge connection and everything looked great. It was very easy for-- it would be very easy for us as administrators to set these connections up and manage these. We could still utilize our existing Vault permissions and Vault groups just working through these folder securities.

      Some downfalls with this was there were some major data security concerns. There was no way to understand and know who was going back and forth between client and server piece. It was a direct connection into our server. There was no buffer right through the Forge platform. But we also still had to manage that complex folder permissions, folder structure.

      And then, the last thing we looked at was our Vault Project Sync. Now, with this, one pro was a simplified project sharing. We could streamline that process of getting folders together, pushing them to a shared location, and then, our vendors had access to them.

      We also have simplified and easy review and markup capabilities, which really seem to enhance collaboration between internal engineers and external vendors. Another thing was we already utilized the job server, so why don't we just add on another job server to our solution and then have that as a dedicated machine for synchronizing properties or synchronizing files back and forth between Fusion team.

      And the last pro here is we have previous experience in configuration. I've set this up previously in a previous life. And Carlos, I'll let you speak on yours a little bit more that we both have extensive experience in the solution.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Thanks, Josh. So this wasn't too difficult for us to get together. I had experience implementing Inventor on Fusion team in the past. I've used it as a collaboration platform in the past. It does a couple of things for you.

      A, it allows you to use Inventor on the cloud. It does have some minuses. We'll go over those in a little bit. But as far as understanding how to set it up from Inventor Fusion team perspective, I had that experience. Josh had experience setting it up from a Vault side of things. He had experience setting Project Sync up in the past plenty of times. So for us, the collaboration and the know how, it was an easy fix for us to put together.

      JOSH WILSON: So let's get into our cons a little bit here with Project Sync. We did have some concerns with large data sets. Within my past, I've had issues with large data sets getting pushed up to Fusion team in here. And we can talk about that a little bit later on how we decided to try and address this.

      The other con was an implementation of life cycles. Not all of our internal locations, internal divisions utilized life cycles yet. So this was a good opportunity for us to try and get that life cycle push into place so we can help streamline and effectively manage data. So Carlos.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Yeah, so again, the winner for us was pretty straightforward. It was Vault Project Sync. We weren't reinventing the wheel here. It was a proven workflow. There had been plenty of articles written about this workflow. I don't know how many people use it before.

      But I had used half of the workflow. Josh had used the other half of the workflow. It was easy for us to set up. It wasn't difficult for users to adapt to since a lot of applications are on the cloud now. So you have many vendors working on ACC or BIM 360 or even using some of the other platforms like Plant 3D on the cloud or Revit. So this was easily adopted across to our vendors. It was not difficult.

      The other thing it provided for us, it streamlined securities. So we now had antivirus being checked in the background. We have Fusion team that checks for some malware. So it kind of relieved us to know that the data was being checked. So it didn't-- it wasn't a direct feed into Vault and we had protection there.

      Looking at the big picture here, and this is why it made the most sense for us, is we're trying to connect data. And in the big picture where we have Fusion 360 Manage, we have Vault, we utilize ACC, or Autodesk Construction Cloud, and pretty soon we'll be connected between Vault in Fusion 360 Manage.

      And so this made sense where we can automate data back and forth to Vault. We can control data being pushed to ACC through Fusion 360 Manage. So that's down the road, but big picture, that's what we're trying to accomplish here.

      JOSH WILSON: So now let's go ahead and get into our validation of Project Sync. With any big company, you do have to prove that something is going to work before you actually implement it to a mass of people. So the first thing we did was we set up a test project.

      Within Fusion team, we went ahead and created a new Fusion team hub. Within that hub, I set up a dedicated Project SyncTest project. Within that project, I was able to set the securities on that project, whether it's a secret project, a closed project. And that just controls who has the ability to see that project and not see that project even if they're not invited to the project.

      Once we had the project created, we could start adding users to that project. Now, we can set who can be a viewer of documents within there. Who's a editor of documents. Who's going to be the project administrator. So it gave us a little bit of freedom and flexibility to define roles within Fusion team itself.

      Now, once we had the Fusion team site set up and the project set up, we were able to get into our Vault solution, go to our external connections tab within our tools administration Vault settings area, and then, we were able to start adding folders to a Sync.

      Now within that option to set this up, we have different sync settings that we can get into a little bit later. But we set this up in a real simplified manner. We had a small subset of data that we wanted to test things with. I think there was just under 500 total components within this subset.

      So we got these project-- or this project initially pushed into the solution. Once we had that, we started reaching out to some of our vendors and our internal engineers saying, hey, look, we think this is going to be a viable solution. Can you guys give us your two cents on it before we try and do anything too crazy with it? So we did. We got a couple end users and a couple vendors willing to help us out and they were able to get into the software.

      Now, once we got our internal users in, we had to talk through our vendors getting them the desktop connector added. Our internal users aren't going to be using desktop connector, just the external vendors would be. Now, we did have some issues with the initial installation of the desktop connector, and we'll get into that in just a little bit.

      But once we got a working desktop connector up and running for those users, we were able to get some feedback from them. And overall, that feedback was great. We had a lot of positives. We had a great number of users saying that this is so easy to use. That it's streamlining their workflow process just that little bit more.

      We had great reviews with the review and markup capabilities. Our engineers were excited that they were able to get in on a phone call with some of these vendors and being able to actively collaborate back and forth with these design review changes and comments and collaboration. And then, the emails that are sent out afterwards for anybody who's involved in there.

      We did get some negative reviews, though. And of course, we always will. But with that desktop connector issue, there was some confusion at the beginning and we were able to get that figured out. Another comment we got back was our vendors didn't like that the files weren't always on their local drive. And that's just how desktop connector works. It's how any cloud drive works, right?

      So it was just an educational thing for them. We had to let them know that, yeah, it's not going to keep a local copy of all these files on your drive. When you're going to go work on a specific set of files, you need to make sure that you get that local copy from the cloud drive down to your local and that really helps speed up their process and their workflow whenever they were opening these files.

      And then, the last thing on the slide we're going to talk about is our implementation timeline. So for our whole testing scenario as a whole, it took us about two months to get from initial design conception to our completion of testing. And a lot of that time did have to do with some IT issues that we had on our end. And we'll get into those a little bit in our lessons learned.

      But overall, initial testing, two months, I don't think it was too bad for us to get this set up, get vendor feedback. We were so happy and so grateful that we had so many people willing to give us that feedback.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Hey, Josh.

      JOSH WILSON: Yeah.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: So the one thing we should mention as well. Some of the positives that came out of this was there was concern about if the data was being synced, if we lost any data. And the one thing to mention here is Fusion team saves a version every time you save the file locally. So every time it synchronizes to Fusion team, it creates a new version.

      And that created another feeling of security for our vendors that they wouldn't lose any work. At the end of the day, that's the most important thing.

      JOSH WILSON: Right, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that versioning is nice where they're able to update their files within Fusion team and then right away they can see that new version is right within there. And then, once it syncs with Vault, that version history is kept within Vault as well.

      So let's go ahead and start talking about how we implemented this. What is our workflow? Carlos, you want to take over?

      CARLOS CAMINOS: So our workflow for projects and creation starts off with Fusion 360 Manage. We have a couple of workspaces, but we decided this was a great opportunity to incorporate Fusion 360 Manage for this workflow. So we created Vault Access Request. This would allow the engineer to enter data as to what project there was, the location of the project, the vendor that was going to be needing access to the Vault or to the files.

      And once this was submitted, email notifications would go out to the data management team. Josh, you want to follow-up?

      JOSH WILSON: Yeah, so from that Fusion 360 Manage workflow, all data management administrators would get email notification. So we would be able to get into this workflow and look at the data submitted by the engineer for this new project, right?

      We're going to be able to see what Vault is this request for since we have six different total Vault servers. We're able to see what specific folders or project files or actual data are these vendors going to be working on that we need to sync.

      The other great thing is the engineer is going to be able to put every single vendor who needs access to this. So from that workflow alone, us as data administrators are able to gather everything that we need to create and set up a new Project Sync.

      We would go into Fusion team, initially, create a new project if we need to create a new project, if there's already a project available for this specific vendor, we can utilize that and just create a new subfolder within that project, or we could create a brand new project altogether.

      Once we are in there and in the proper project, we can then look back at our Fusion 360 Manage workflow and say, OK, here's our list of users. We need to make sure that we grant these users editor access to this project.

      We can also define if the engineer has defined anybody as just a viewer. We could define specific users as view only. But the majority of our users are going to be editors within the software.

      Once we have the project set up and our users added, then we can get into Vault and start our configuration. So we go into that tools administration Vault settings, go to our Collaboration tab, and start adding in new syncs. From there, we're going to be able to select what Fusion Drive we're going to or Fusion project we're going to. We're able to tell it what Vault folder specifically we want to do.

      And then, once we get that set up, we have the option for an initial push or a scheduled sync, a bi-directional, you have all these options when setting up this sync. So initially what we do is we start an initial push. This initial push, we did set up a life cycle process in Vault for this.

      That way, our end users within Bridgestone internally understand that, OK, these files are now being worked on by an external vendor. So we don't want to make any changes to them until we get the OK from that vendor that they're good.

      So we transition these files to this work-- this with vendor life cycle state. And that's going to kick off our initial push to Fusion team. Varying types of data and sizes of data are going to take a different amount of time. So we try and get all that information for how much data is within these vaulted folders before we do this push so that we understand an estimated time on how long it's going to take for this initial push.

      Once we get that initial push up in the Fusion team, then we go through and we set our sync schedule. The great thing with this sync schedule is where our users are geographically, know whether they're in East Coast in the US or West Coast, Latin America, wherever we can optimize the sync to best suit their working day.

      Because what we don't want to do is bottleneck the system during working hours. We want to have everybody to have a seamless transition and a seamless sync between this data. One of the ways we have done this is we have a total of 10 job processor machines across all six of our Vault servers. We have at least one job processor dedicated to each server.

      But then, as projects vary and size of project syncs vary, we can allocate those additional for server or job processor machines to those different servers. The other thing we can do is we can offset our sync schedule. We're able to start a sync at 3:00 in the morning and have it be done by 4:00 in the morning and kick off another one.

      Or if we want to schedule one for later in the afternoon, a 6:00 PM, a 9:00 PM sync just to capture any data that's changed at the end of that day, we can get all that done before our scheduled Vault backup runs.

      So the sync schedule has really given us the flexibility to set and prioritize to make sure we get the syncs done in the order we want them done and in the timeliness we want to get them done.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: To add to that, I think we should mention there are times-- people hate waiting to download project files. And one of the benefits here is that our vendor, once the initial download is completed, it's maybe a function of updating a file or two. That's if an engineer or someone who has access to the project at Bridgestone updated the file.

      So that might be one to-- it might be 10 files, but it's not the entire project. So they have immediate access to the project. They can continue working hour after hour or day after day without having to reload or redownload the data.

      JOSH WILSON: Yeah, Carlos, a future question for you. With us using Fusion 360 Manage and Vault with life cycles, do you see some point in the future a connector where we can start to sync these Vault access requests directly with specific projects within Vault to more streamline a life cycle state transition change or anything like that to help streamline this entire workflow?

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Yeah. So the idea here is, ultimately, we're creating these automations, right? And if we start managing life cycles through Fusion 360 Manage, we then have the ability to send files to, say, ACC for construction or to other locations, right? But for now, ACC would make the most sense.

      So there is a possibility where we have projects that are starting to get built. There's the equipment that's being designed by our external vendors. As those files get released in Vault, they get checked and they get released then. Then, from Fusion 360 Manage, we can track that process and release them into construction.

      So that's a very real workflow. We're a little bit away from it, but it's realistic workflow for us to try to achieve.

      JOSH WILSON: All right, cool. Let's go ahead and get into our lessons learned here. So first lesson learned up is going to be Desktop Connector. Carlos, do you want to talk about Desktop Connector?

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Sure. So of course, when we first set it up, we're not aware of things changing. And the initial Desktop Connector that we used created some problems for us. It wasn't synchronizing files or it was erroring out. And with some work with Autodesk, we figured out we needed to roll back the Desktop Connector.

      So think we started off with version 16.0 and it wasn't working correctly. So Autodesk recommended we roll it back to 15.8. I think now we're at version 16.3, we haven't seen any more issues. That took us a little bit to figure out. But it's good to know that there is no more problems right now.

      JOSH WILSON: Yeah, the next issue that we had were proxy-related issues. Internally, in Bridgestone, we do use a proxy environment. And we thought we'd got everything fixed out with those Desktop Connector issues in the version 15.8. But we were still getting some sync errors. We were utilizing the job processor logs and all that to see what was happening in the background.

      And it ended up being a proxy-related issue. We are using Windows authentication accounts for our job processor users. And IT had some, I guess, policies set up for these specific user accounts that was giving us some issues with proxy.

      This is what ended up taking us the most amount of time in our initial setup and testing phase. Within that first two months, this probably took every bit of a month plus for us to figure out exactly what information it was that IT needed and the configurations that they needed to do to get the data to pass through efficiently without us having any issues.

      Once we figured all that out, we worked with our reseller, ImageNet. And we worked with Autodesk directly and our internal IT and we finally came up with a solution. And once we got it passed through, everything was great.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: So this was interesting here. So when you create a Fusion team project, you first have to create a hub, right? So every person that tries to use, let's say, Fusion 360, because that is a tool that we use internally, the same way when we went to use Fusion 360 Team, we have to create a hub.

      For example, with Fusion 360, if we had 20 users, even if they wanted to play with Fusion 360, it created a hub. This is a different type of challenge. And as being a manager of data, this created-- this raised our eyebrows real quick, especially for our team.

      When these hubs are created, unless you're the creator or you've been granted access to it, no one else sees these hubs. Of course, you can see how this was an immediate concern for us. We quickly realized there were so many hubs created and no one really knew what they were doing at that point.

      And right away, being at such a big company, you start thinking about, well, how about the people that are no longer with us? How much valuable data is there? There's a lot of workflows to synchronize data back to Vault and make it the single source of the truth. But the reality is we're still working on that.

      So working with Autodesk, we were able to gain access to all these hubs. I think in the future, they're going to have a better solution for this. Right now, we'll probably end up going to one hub, which is perfect. Everything's going to get merged into one hub.

      And I think in the future everything will just get created into one hub. Part of our issue was that we had several domains. So it created even a visibility access even internally for us. So that was eye-opening for us and it was interesting figuring that out and finding a solution.

      JOSH WILSON: Yeah, on our last topic here is going to be vendor insights. Our vendors have been utilizing this solution for a handful of months now. And there are some of them that do use Vault professionally internal as well. So some wild ideas have been thrown around and we're doing some testing to see if it's even a viable solution.

      But what is the possibility of having two different Vault professional environments sync to the same Fusion team project? Is it even possible? Is it going to read and write data the same? And are there going to be any update or syncing issues?

      We don't know. We're just getting into starting that out. We have a couple of test projects set up where we're testing this environment out to see. And we'll keep you posted on that as time moves on if it even becomes a viable solution.

      The other thing is documentation. Documentation is huge, not just for us, but for everyone. And we ended up creating documentation to help other people out. Our vendors, we created a standalone vendor collaboration document that we can give to our vendors and have a little training session with them that shows them exactly the workflow that would be ideal with working inside a Fusion team with our existing data sync data and with the existing IPJ file that we create that has all of the links to our design data and templates that we upload into Fusion team.

      The other thing is internally. We created a user document within or for our internal users that completely lays out what an internal engineer would need know from start to finish. You have a new project coming on and you need vendor access. So here's your list. You need to get into Fusion 360 Manage. Get all this information so that you could submit a Vault access request to the data management team.

      Once that is submitted, we get notified. We can do our work and get everything we need done. And once we get that done, we transition that Fusion 360 Manage workflow to the next step. The engineer and all of our external vendors get emailed and say, hey, your project is ready to go.

      So a clean document that outlines every step of the way, that way if anybody has any questions they can refer to that as time moves forward. And then, the last thing we did was we created an administrator's document. We see our team growing exponentially. So when we're onboarding people and we have new people coming in, we want to help streamline their onboarding process and their education and how we have things documented.

      So we created a full step by step document that not only details out the workflow of what is needed, but all the back end information that sometimes gets lost from manager to manager as people evolve and grow and get pushed to different positions that anybody could get in who has the correct credentials to say, OK, we have this vendor access request. What do we do?

      All right, we need to get into a Fusion team and create this new project and assign these user's specific permissions. And we need to get into Vault and add this in here and transition the Fusion 360 Manage workflows and all of this information all into one document to help streamline and improve education and the passing of knowledge.

      Because we don't want to be the only ones in our company who know how to do this. We want to give that knowledge to as many people as we can that way we can help product in the engineering process to manufacturing be as streamlined as we possibly can. Carlos, do you have anything else to add on top of that?

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Yeah, I think it's important to understand-- we're at a bigger company. And I think it's important to understand with smaller projects, set those things up, make sure they work. That worked out really well for us. But it's something we've practiced in the past with different solutions we've implemented.

      It's important to track changes. We didn't talk about it, but we do have an issues tracking through Fusion 360 Manage where things just get documented. And this is just another example of something else as it evolves. I think this is not going away. By all means, it's not perfect. But it provides a very solid solution, especially as IT security becomes more important, and especially as more solutions go to the cloud.

      There's a lot of benefits. Right now this is a little bit slower maybe, but it works perfectly fine.

      JOSH WILSON: Yeah, great. So let's just start to wrap things up here. We do have a QR code on the screen here for you. We'd love to connect with you. These are direct links to our LinkedIn. So feel free. Scan those, connect with us. And if you have any questions, feel free to shoot us an email or a message right within LinkedIn. We'll be happy to get in touch with you.

      It was a pleasure speaking. And Carlos, do you have anything you'd like to say?

      CARLOS CAMINOS: Yeah, it was a pleasure listening to you speak, Josh. Great job.

      JOSH WILSON: Thank you.

      CARLOS CAMINOS: We both collaborated quite a bit. But the technical information you're providing is incredible. We hope to hear from you. We're available. We're very active on social media so please reach out to us.

      JOSH WILSON: And with that, thank you for attending and we hope to see you soon.