The Office Space: Utilizing "Other" Areas of Your PLM System

Welcome to Autodesk University class Mike foxtrot golf 501232, the office space-- utilizing other areas of the Fusion 360 Manage Client For Your Business. My name is Timothy Curry and I am the PLM systems lead at Owens Corning.

In today's class, we're going to provide some information about who Owens Corning is, our capital delivery teams, where they were, where we needed to go, our initial steps to get there, and what happened after we started progressing and growing. We'll then demonstrate how the Autodesk Fusion 360 manages software workspaces outside of our main project, or engineering workspaces, the process used to develop those workspaces from scratch to suit our needs, and the recommendations that we have for others from our lessons learned.

Owens Corning is located in 33 countries. Our world headquarters is in Toledo, Ohio. We have facilities throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Our science and technology centers are located in Granville, Ohio Chambery, France and Shanghai, China. The capital delivery team is the team that I'm a member of, and this works with multiple different divisions of our business, dealing in composites, insulation, and roofing and asphalt.

Our team's a little unique because we're a design build team for the company. Our team members are those of various cultures, languages, levels of experience, and even amounts of time prior to their retirement. All of our projects that we handle are just over $1,000,000 and up.

So where were we, and what were our challenges? Well, we're a global company there's a lot of challenges that you'll experience as you work in multiple time zones for the corporation. However, our biggest challenge was information security. Email traffic was everything. And in doing so, if somebody left, you might not have what you needed. Files could be residing on employee or ex-employee hard drives or restricted server drives. What happens when a laptop comes up missing on a trip? And lastly, we're transferring large files via thumb drives or CDs. The problem with that is our information is no longer secure because we no longer controlled who had access to it once it left the system.

We were creating documentation loops-- you would create, publish, print, sign, scan, send, and repeat. And throughout different individuals, they all had their own varying styles of forms, so this could make it difficult for our partners to have the same information each time that they were getting something. And connection speeds is another challenge that we face, especially today, you have people that are in home offices or the actual office itself and some of our employees are even working inside of plants. So all of these factors were challenges that we were currently seeing at that time when we started this journey.

So what was the expectations and what did we need in a piece of software? We needed something that was cloud-based. So in working in multiple regions, collaboration is very much the key. We had something that was easily configurable. Our teams were very successful in the projects that they delivered. So we needed a software that we could configure to match how we currently operated so that we could continue to be successful in delivering future projects, as well as training new team members in how our projects functioned.

And lastly, we really needed something that was cellular or mobile access. As our team members are traveling from site to site, or from the office to a site, we had to have the ability for them to have information at their fingertips and not have it to where you would have to take out your laptop every time you've got to stop in an airport to pull up everything, log in and see where stuff was at via your email. This allows you to have total control of your projects, right in the palm of your hand.

We've been at this for a while. Owens Corning started with Autodesk PLM 360 back in 2013. It progressed through the Autodesk Fusion lifecycle. And now we're still utilizing it as Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage. In 2013, when we first started with this, we ended up testing it on our contract change proposals for our construction managers for a single project. With their buy off of how efficient and easy the software was to use, we then progressed over to our design change alerts.

As we started growing at an accelerated rate, we started adding in and creating libraries inside of the system that would guarantee the users were always getting the latest revision of each documentation, whether it be for projects or our standards. In the last few years, we've made a switch in reporting from inside of the system, instead of just Word documents being uploaded. We could see that in our pre-pandemic pandemic days. Now we're working on building the correct foundations for information to flow smoothly, as well as to expand other areas in need for our project as we get into our digital platform going for 2022 and beyond.

Our areas of thought for today's session-- our office space. What are our procedures? These are all things that help us work inside of the office. You have things from the very beginning like project initiation, timesheets, travel requests, employee travel records, passport and visa requests and renewals, new employee onboarding, catering requests, and office requests and purchases.

So let's take a look at our workspaces that we have-- project initiation. This is where everything starts and this is the one that starts tying everything together. In this, we build projects. Not necessarily ones that always get created, but ones that people work on, collaborate in, and the information on this starts tying to other pieces of documentation as well as other workspaces inside a Fusion 360 Manage. And that information allows us to keep everything connected together in one system.

Our timesheets-- project billing at its finest. And in this, what we see is that we have information that's presented for a specific individual and who they might be reporting to, as well as the times that they're working, and what costs their centers they're are coming from. And as they go through and complete timesheets, they're then going in and have the ability to pull reports based on individual uses, timesheets for a specific project going across all employees, as well as the division as a whole on a monthly charge basis. This information really took place because we had an issue with a different pre-existing piece of software that we were utilizing.

So one of the things that we tried to look at was, well, we're using Fusion 360 Manage for everything else, why not try using it for this as well. And that's where some of these workspaces started coming into play.

Our travel requests-- domestic and international because we do both in our company and the purpose of the travel request was really so that we could reduce unnecessary project travel. It informed the project teams who was coming to site and win. And it also allowed you to capture costs associated to a project for specific travel for future projects. Now, one of the things in going through and reducing unnecessary travel is it allowed us to take our group and allow engineers to truly be engineers.

Rather than having to go to a job site and babysit a project all the time, they could actually stay in the office and do engineering and developing our next big items. And this is one of the reasons that we started tracking that, and with today's culture with all the other things that are available inside of the cloud, you can easily get access to a facility without having to be there in person to complete those.

Additionally, as we went through COVID times, we had regulations and restrictions placed on our team. And this allowed us to keep all of our employees safe in their travel. Now, from the travel request, we have our travel records. And this is broken out into three different areas-- the passport, the stamps, and the visas. The passport area basically just keeps a record of who's from which country of issuance as well as when their passport expires.

Now, in looking at that, it allows us to keep in mind how soon we need to go back and get passports renewed, so we don't get stuck someplace. And as we look at our visas information if we would have an upset facility, leadership can actually come into this workspace and see who still has visas that are active and send one of those employees to help deal with the upset conditions inside of our plants. And lastly, it's the stamps. And those are records generated from our post-trip actuals from the travel request. And as we go through this, I'll show you a little bit later how that actually occurs.

Our passport and visas requests and renewals-- both of these are very similar in the process. And it used to be a lot of email traffic going back and forth between the requester and our office administrator. Employees now, with this being in place, can see where the requests are in the process for both their passports and visas, and it also ensures that nothing was missed that could cause the requested renewal to be slowed down or rejected and returned back to the user.

New employee onboarding-- this is the one chance that a company has to make a great impression on a new employee and in building this, our office administrators truly took a very large leap that was successful. The purpose that they created this for was as if you were getting ready to retire and new office administrators were being brought in, they didn't want to lose the tribal knowledge of everything that happened for every new employee to make their experience at Owens Corning great. So they started listing out the different things that had to happen four weeks, two weeks, one week, and even the starting week of that employee. And we'll take a look at this total process a little bit later inside of the system as well.

Catering requests-- have you ever heard the conversation in the office of somebody walking up to possibly one of the admins or junior person on the team and making sure that they could get food ordered for the next business meeting? The questions and conversations usually go, well, what would you like? Well, obviously we want something good? And then the questions start getting just rapid fire of, well, how many people are attending? Is this going to be for a project? Who's going to be attending? Where are you having the meeting? Are there any special requests that have to be taken note of by our office administrators?

Laying out the different questions that have gone back and forth with some of our other employees, we were able to develop this site specifically to handle those requests. And in doing so, this saves not only time, but also communication traffic. It also keeps the requester informed of the cost for the meal that they're selecting, as well as seeing what is available in the company's menu, along with the status of their order.

Office requests and purchases-- we had restrictions. Not everybody has access to a purchase card, and not everybody has access to request different things that happen on Owens Corning's property. So a lot of those go through our office administrators. And this is another site that they developed to help keep track of all the things so that they don't get lost in the email traffic of everyday items.

It allows a requester to clearly define what their original request is, when things might need to be delivered, how many things they might be looking at, and, if it's a purchase, specifically what item they're looking at from what location. And like our other workspaces, this has a status on it as well. So we can see when something was submitted as well as when it was taken care of.

So our design process-- how do we do it? Whiteboarding. We start out with developing categories and workflows. Now digital or physical whiteboarding makes programming Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage so much easier. In this, will take a look at our new employee onboarding. On the left, you'll see that there are four different colors of Post-Its. On the pink, we have different pieces of employee information. In the blue, we get into equipment requests. That yellowish green color, we've got software that is taking place. And in that magenta color, we're looking at different resources.

The picture on the right-- with the office administrators, we started laying out everything that happens during those four to five weeks prior to an employee starting all the way up into their start date. And in capturing those, we realized how many things there truly were to make an employee's first day at Owens Corning truly wonderful.

So unlike our other workspaces, this one we went through and segregated the process. We went through and took the items and tasks and broke them into time frames. If this should be repeatable, it was deemed for new employee onboarding that a single workflow would not be the best option. And why is that? Because not everything is complete.

Workflow still needs to proceed, and the next task still needed to be done. And in doing a single workflow with every one of those being its own item, that's a little difficult to do. But by grouping them together in time frames and sections, we can go through and pick and choose when we complete each one of those, and we can go back and catch the ones that were missed at a later time.

So now let's take a look inside of our system. This is Owens Corning's Fusion 360 Manage page. And in it, I can see some of my outstanding work. And first, I want to take you into our project initiation for time sheet listing. So for this project, that we have for Autodesk University, we're going through and taking a look at a few different key areas.

And this is where we bring into the fact that, yes, this is a project, how it's actually functioning with our ERP system for SAP, for the project structure, for the work breakdown structure and WBS structure. And we can see that the system is now chargeable, so somebody can actually find this inside of the timesheets and charge their time to it

The second area that is utilized the most inside of our system is the PLM users. And this is a workspace we developed a little later in the process that I wish we would have developed earlier in the process. Because what this allows for is the individuals to not only have their name in the system. But what we noticed is as users left Owens Corning, or left the role that they were in and transferred outside of the system, we no longer had their name associated with tasks that were complete. So what did we do? We went through and added in a removed username. This allowed for us-- this allows for us to, when somebody leaves, put their name in that location, and anywhere that they had previously approved something or done something in the system, their name will still appear tied to that account because it's part of this workspace.

It also allowed us to capture who their leadership is, their passport information right off the bat, what companies they might report to, their phone numbers for the office as well as cells, and their company email address. All of that is important because for each one of our projects, we have a project team. And building a project team list can take time. However, if you just go through and pick the list of employees out of the system that we have, you can build a project team in a matter of just minutes.

Our passport stamps and visas-- so as I mentioned, we have some basic information for our passport information here. And as well as our visa information for which visas we currently hold. And you'll notice what we've done here is our stamps are on a grid tab. And currently, I'm sitting at 74, with my last travel being done at the beginning of January of 2020, so at the beginning of the pandemic.

Now we've got this trip to Autodesk University for this week, and what we're looking at is capturing some basic information. So when I'm traveling, my class of travel, the dates that I'm gone, and my leadership. As this goes through and gets approved, it comes back to me in the workflow. And then through the workflow, I can actually go through and submit it to grab post-trip actuals.

So these post-trip actuals allow me to then fill out with some of our coding that we've developed for the script to actually take that information and push it from our travel request to our passport stamps and visas. Now this is an important step for us because as we go through and complete this task, our workflow will show that everything is complete and it's a simple flow. And as we come back over to our passport stamps and visas, when we go through and refresh the system, you will see that we're now at 75 stamps, and our last one was actually September 26 to September 30, for Autodesk University.

This workspace is used a lot inside of Owens Corning for our global mobility team. The information from here helps us identify what employees have been in which countries, so that we can properly pay taxes as we would for each one of our projects. It also ensures that none of our employees are staying past the time duration limits that are set in place for specific countries or specific regions.

And for that report-- as we come into our reporting structure, we already have a couple of passport stamps and visas reports. We've got some for individuals as well as our European count, but we'll go ahead and run the report for our total travel. And here is our report. Now this is what I'm able to send to global mobility with each person's name and for which country. So these could easily be sorted and captured for who is where when to help us make sure that we're abiding by all the regulations that are in place for us as employees.

And now we'll take a look at our new employee onboarding. This is the last of the workspaces that we mentioned earlier. And in this, unlike the other ones that have a straight workflow, we chose not to put a workflow in because there was a time and a place. And for this workspace, this wasn't the place for a standard workflow because we wanted to make sure that everything could be done when it needed to be done. And if something wasn't ready, it didn't hold up the rest of the process. Because we can't let perfection get in the way of progress. So with this, we've been able to go through and help new employees feel welcome at Owens Corning as they have started their next steps.

Now, if there are any questions or comments for the class, please go through and place them in the section of the class, and I will be interacting with those as I can, as the conference goes on and afterwards. And if you liked this class, please go through and recommend it. Thank you.