Transforming the Consumer Experience with Mass Customization

LIOR GERLING: All right. We'll get started. Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]. We're going to start a little late, but we'll try to do a really quick run out, so you'll get the benefit. I know it's already too late for you guys, as well, around the day. I hate to deliver late day sessions, but I promise you it's going to be so mind blowing, so don't worry.

Let's get started. My name is Lior Gerling. I am the senior product manager in the Forge product management team. I'm really excited to talk today about the interactive development experience, the integrated development experience, together with me and Anurag with the solution managers. And we're going to talk a little bit about how Forge IDX delivered the mass customization piece to your customers.

ANURAG SHARMA: Did you guys all listen to the keynote in the morning? So you can see how this is going a little deeper into what you heard about the personalization and customization. The world is changing. It sounds like a cliche. So what do you mean by that?

Think about how we used to do the shopping 10 years back. It doesn't matter if you're talking about electronic items, or your clothes, the shoes, or for that matter, many other stuff, we used to go to the physical brick and mortar store. Used to go shop around, go around the places, look at it, touch and feel it, and then buy. And that's how we thought about the instant gratification.

Look at now. All of us, pretty much every one of us, goes to Amazon and that's where we shop, and it's instant gratification. The meaning of instant gratification has changed completely with that. And the trust factor has changed.

In the past, when you say, you picked this thing, and we're going to ship it to you, you're not so sure about it. Nowadays, you don't care about it. Yeah, this is what I want. This is exactly what I want. This is exactly what [INAUDIBLE] money, and that's what I want, and you trust Amazon, and it's going to be showing in your door in two days or even before that.

So that's the type of world changing I'm talking about. Now let's put that into perspective. Think about a hundred years back when Henry Ford started the Model T. This is what we used to hear. What personalization are you talking about?

Yeah, you're going to get a car as long as it is black in color. But what it did is he revolutionized the way the assembly line was set up-- how you can make more and more cars. Before all this new technique of the assembly line, they used to make 25 cars a day. From there, they moved to the hundreds.

To get more into the perspective, there was a time when they had 12 hours to make one car, and that reduced to two and a half hours. So there is that world changing, and then in that process, I think people thought, hey, this is great. I'm getting what I want. But really, there was no personalization.

But was that needed at that time? Probably not. What they needed is-- this is great. I have a horseless car, in a way, and now I can take that horseless car to my farm and do whatever I need today. That is huge back then.

And now the world is changing. With the coming of the social media, with the coming of the new generation into the workforce, the expectation about the whole social collaboration gratification is totally changing. You want what you want, and it should be personalized to me.

Like in this example, it says, I want a small red car, which has an automatic transmission and rear-view park assist, and I don't want to pay more than 320 euros. This coming directly from some of the customers we're talking about. So that's the type of thing we're talking about, and personalization and customization, you have to take in the same breath, depending on who you are.

Because everybody who is sitting in this room or who so it is in the Autodesk University today and for the rest of this week, either you're a consumer of all of that items, you're consuming, whether it's the car, or whether it's the clothes, or whatever Autodesk customers are making, and you are them, as well. You are the person who are manufacturing it. And you are the many people who are the enabler of that.

What I mean by enabler-- like Autodesk. We are the enabler of our customers, manufacturing AC, doesn't matter, who are providing that type of a platform, so that this instant gratification personalization can happen. And you as a customer need to think about how do I do the personalization, and that's where the mass customization really comes into play, because I want to customize it to what my customers are demanding.

And it doesn't matter from which particular industry you belong. You may be making all the consumer products, or you may be making some industrial products, maybe you're part of the architecture construction. It doesn't matter. This is becoming more ubiquitous, and it's because of the behavior we as a consumer are looking at. So that's very important.

You shouldn't be thinking about I'm not part of that industry. You are part of that industry, really. So let me see a show of hands. How many of you are from the manufacturing domain? How many of you are from the AC? So it's kind of 50/50 in some ways.

So this is very real, and this is coming in, for example, we are working with some of the customers who are making doors and windows. What they are looking for is how I can really go to my consumer that's an architect, or whether I'm putting up a whole township or something like that, and how I can show to my customers, my architects, here is how you're making the whole house, and here is how your doors and windows are going to fit, and it's visually seeing that. That itself makes a huge impact, and you can pick and choose based on what you want.

And that's what a few of these examples is showing, and you'll see that more when Lior talks about it. And the whole breadth of mass customization is pretty broad. You shouldn't be thinking about is it just the physical product I make. Not really. It could be [INAUDIBLE] offering. It's a product like a physical product, or it could be the services that you're offering. It goes through the complete customer lifecycle.

So the world is changing. The future is here. It's not that this is something we need to figure out 10 years from now, or five years, or I would say even two years from now. It is something needs to be figured out now, because it's happening. We're working with many customers to do those type of things already.

So we wanted to bring this to you in this session, and that's why it is very important to start thinking about what you saw in the keynote, and then how you can really bring it to the reality. So that's what I want to leave you guys with saying-- what is personalization, what is mass customization, and how you can really make it real.

But that's not all. Every of these type of changes or innovative ways of doing things bring some challenges. And these are the six challenges which we are seeing all across the industry.

You think about, is it going to be costing, how can I deliver it faster. It is taking too long if I go with the traditional way of making things. The cost impact is going to be huge, because I may be needing a lot of workforce. I may be needing a lot of systems to do those type of things.

And I need to figure it out how to do those type of things. Design tools today, if you think of the CAD tools and all, in some ways, it provides a great flexibility, if you think about 10 years back, like in the '90s and early 2000s. But for today's world, it is becoming very constraining and very static in some ways. How I can make it much more dynamic design tool, which is going to help me really do the personalization.

For example, I want a certain type of shoe with this type of color, or I want a different size for this particular type of thing, or if I want to, let's say even in the industrial, I want a wall that would go into the hydraulic system for a particular type of application. Maybe it's for the oil and gas versus just the flow meter kind of thing. So there is a lot of personalization you need, and that's where this dynamism in the tool is so required, and I think that sometimes becomes a challenge for anybody to adopt this mass customization.

Then the whole personalization-- how do I get that data. How do I really understand what my customers are looking at? Who is my customer? You know your customer, but what is the breadth of that customer? Because the customers are also changing. How do you really cater to those type of customers? I think that's important as well.

Because of the silos application, they are CRM, they are ERP, they're PLM. There's so many of these typical enterprise or small systems, which is there, but in some ways, they are talking, but in some ways, they're not talking. How do you really bring it all together to really have a very holistic view of really delivering that mass customization to your customers? I think that becomes a challenge as well.

The configuration by itself-- there is a lot of complexity depending on what product you have. The complexity may range from way too complex to some complex or, I'm sure it's not going to be simple, like the click of a button kind of a thing. So how you can simplify it, how you can present it in a way that it provides that mass customization, but underlying foundation, really helps you to scale it up without making it too costly for you to make.

The last but not the least on the sales velocities perspective, you want to sell more. You want to reach to as many customer as you want, but at the same time, it should be cost effective. You cannot have huge workforce, one to one reaching out to those customers. There are going to be workforce to scale you up, but at some level, you need to have a retail strategy.

It doesn't matter. Again, you may be part of the industrial company, or you may be part of the medical device, or you may be part of the architecture construction company. It doesn't matter. You need to have that scale to bring that sales velocity to increase your reach to the customers, more you're selling, but in a more cost effective way.

So these are the six things which have been highlighted from all the industry trends, talking to different customers, and you'll see you're going to be talking more little details. With the Forge platform, we are addressing these particular problems, and we are providing that solution, which is going to help the larger and wider customer, from enterprise, to the ISVs, to even the assembly market, which is going to help them scale it up and really create a solution that caters to what they're trying to provide from personalization to the mass customization. So with that, I will give it to Lior.

LIOR GERLING: Thank you, Anurag. And that brings us to integrated development experience. So with all of those challenges, it's really hard to build today an amazing web application that can really serve your users and build the product they really need or customize the product that they really need. This is what all mass customization is about.

You've seen in the morning today the lean forward story, how they actually can design prosthesis, customize that in an ad hoc, print it, and just fit it into the patient itself. This is unbelievable story. And they could do it, because we could help them with the Forge technology can help them, and this is all about mass customization.

What is it really, the integrated development experience? It's all about a tool, a what you see is what you get application that you can drag and drop and build amazing applications that use our Autodesk technologies. Any web services, any APIs that you have seen in Forge, that will be aggregated into our tools.

So you will be able to go and just drag and drop and build an amazing application. And in this case, and what we talk about at the first use case is going to be build an application that really helped mass customization or enable the mass customization in your application.

Now let's talk about some of the key functionalities you've probably seen in the slides before in some of the sessions. But this is all about the whole amazing benefit that you can get from the IDXs as well.

The first and the most important one is actually the real time modeling and editing in the web. The ability to go and give you, your users, your customers the ability to go and edit in the web, and model, and change parameters, or give the users the ability to go and design the product they actually want to have using an amazing editing in the web.

That one is the more real product to give the users-- the more real experience you're going to give to your users about the product that is going to buy, the better the chances you're going to sell the product. So getting that photo realistic experience that you actually give the right wood pictures or the right metal image itself that give it a better reality about the product that they actually consume it. And, of course, the power of the world class of our viewer that you can actually go and in 3D look at the product itself, zooming in, expand that, explore that, and get the real feeling of what you're actually buying in a 3D concept.

Last but most important piece is actually get data in any device. We are shopping in mobile with phones and tablets on any web. We need to be agnostic to all of those technologies, so when you go and build an application, it actually needs to be seamless and agnostic to every one of those devices.

And what about other and future ones? So this morning when we talked and we showed you the lean forward story, it was the integration with the 3D printing, and of course, the modeling. But the future is about also augmented reality, and virtual reality, and scanning, and of course, other printing capabilities. And all the services that you're actually hearing from the Forge that need to be exposed to that tools, so you would be able to go and build applications using all of those different services.

And on top of that, all of the AI and machine learning. So they give you the ability to go and provide more recommendation. And most importantly, the personalization, so you actually learn what the user is doing, and based on the data that you gather from our tools, you will be able to go and start personalizing the experience and get a better product adoption.

Let's have a look and see how is that in action. So this is a quick video to actually show you some of the capabilities in life and what you can actually do. So that's what you've already seen in the morning, like the lean forward story, that you will be able to go and configure the product. In this case, you go and configure. In real time, you configure the prosthesis.

And of course, other solutions in the area of wedding rings. So you can build these kinds of applications where you can actually go configure in live all of the things. Or just like a simple robot, you can actually completely go and configure the old product itself.

The whole viewing and the rendering-- and again, as I mentioned, the more real you get, the better sales you're going to get. And if you give the viewing capabilities-- I mentioned it used our award class viewer-- and you give that notion for the users to go and expand, or look at what they're actually buying, or what they're actually customizing.

And more importantly, give them the touch of the material itself, and give them the photo realistic experience. You're going to get better chances. So another case, give the real glance and shadowing and the old technologies that we actually use and integrate into our material libraries, and apply that into a product like this, you get a better chance.

So what about the cut editing? So this is another example of what you can actually do-- give the users, in this case, at dental clinics where they actually can go and customize the tooth to exactly what they want, or in this case, to give the clinician the ability to go and customize the prosthesis, so you actually can fit exactly to the patient that you actually go in and print into that one. And it's all in the web, of course, and using our services.

And the most important is they start to talk about the different services, diverse services, that we have within Forge, so there is no better way to actually go and benefit all of those services when you go build your application. In this case, we have an IoT with the fusion connect where you actually can connect that IoT into that IDX and actually go and build an application to connect all of this data and actually display that in a 3D real time experience.

It all starts with, of course, the complexity of this architecture. You've seen that probably thousands of times, but this is the whole foundation of everything. And we try to make it really, really simple in a way, of course, you have all of today Forge cloud services, and we have the common data environment, which is all the [INAUDIBLE] and the [INAUDIBLE] frequency data management. It's all the foundation.

So if you're a developer, we're actually going to provide you a set of reusable components, and this is our application framework. We're going to give you SDKs, so you can actually go and start embedding those different components, like the cube viewers on the right or navigation tools on the viewer. You can go build your own components and go and edit into the IDX or your tool itself.

And on top of that, of course, our integrated development experience, so not only to actually build on top of those reusable components, so you can actually go and drag and drop all of those things, but of course, we offer you a set of functionalities, like the data management browser, or asset management in the case of the mass customization, or the publishing capability, or the ability to go and have a graphic tool set and design tool sets, so you can actually go and drag and build on top of that.

It only takes five steps to build your application. It starts, of course, by getting your design. You build your design, your CAD designs. You go and integrate that design into the IDX, and then you start by designing your web application, the experience that you want to show.

And the next one, of course, you connect to different services, like the 3D printing, or maybe in the future, the AR and the VR, the machine learning, all of the things. And you publish. Let's have a look and see.

So this is going to show you a video of how we actually build the LimbForge experience. So in this case, we have a CAD design. We have an engineer actually draw and design the prosthetic itself and save it into the cloud.

And you take that design. You're going to see that within the IDX environment, you create the application. And then you will see on the left, the area where you are actually going to browse all of the CAD designs that you have.

And you drag and drop that into the canvas. And the canvas already transcoded that design into the word that the IDX understands. And you can start applying many, many things on that.

First of all, you can start designing the whole thing, so you add that reusable navigation concept and the cubes on the right. And you start designing that web application. The configurator is on the left, so you can actually go and apply the changes on the parametric levels for that specific prosthesis.

Connecting Forge services, in this case, we actually used the 3D printing. So you actually can go, and when you go and click on Print, we're actually going to take that design and translate that to an STL file type. Or in the future, we can connect to different services like Netfabb and Delcam.

And the last one is how you publish that. So right now we support HTML web. In the future we are, of course, going to support mobile native IOS and Android, but that's the area.

So it's all about building an amazing experience. So we try, no matter if you are a developer or non-developers, we are going to give you the tools for you to go and build applications that can help you to enhance your mass customization experience.

In this case, you can use the IDX to go and just drag and drop what you see is what you get application. Or if you need an advanced development experience, you can always go and interact with our application framework. And those are coming soon, very soon.

If you guys want, you're more than welcome to join to our beta programs. We actually start to offer a private beta to some customers to go and start building this application. We are going to walk with you, learn through use cases, and help you. We, of course, learn to improve that, so before we actually go and offer that to the public.

And of course, there are more classes that are going to dive into the core and debates, like what is HFDM, and how the application framework is really built around that, and how we actually enabled this IDX to integrate the development experience. So tomorrow there is another class, so you can join to that one. Thank you. Any questions?

[APPLAUSE]

Promised it was quick. Any questions? Yep?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LIOR GERLING: We are hoping to start and offer that at Q2, beginning of Q2. Yep?

AUDIENCE: I understand that you'll be having better customization [INAUDIBLE] How much is that going to be based off the existing [INAUDIBLE] or reused? How much of it is going to be totally new? I've heard stories that it's going to be very much like the Fusion API. Do we know at this point what it's going to be like?

LIOR GERLING: Yeah, it's dependant on the use case itself. If you're looking for a simple configuration like the LimbForge area, you can actually 100% use whatever the components we offer you, the configurator experience, the viewing, the 3D, and the printing. The more advanced, of course, you can go develop that by yourself by integrating directly to the application, and reuse whatever components, or even use some of the services and develop your own code by itself. Everything, and even within the IDX, you have what we call the advanced coding experience where you actually can add yourself the code.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LIOR GERLING: Right now, this is the Fusion web experience, but we want to support many more. The viewing, by the way, you will be able to go and whatever hour of your support, so it's a hundred types of CAD, but that real time editing modeling, that's Fusion right now. We want to support for them more in the future.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LIOR GERLING: In the Fusion, Fusion web, yep.

AUDIENCE: Are there any challenges to doing [INAUDIBLE]

LIOR GERLING: Yes, we're looking at that. There is a project called quantum. Actually, there is a session, or there was a session, today that talked about getting the Revit web experience as well, but yes, there are teams that are actually trying to get that web experience editing with Revit.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LIOR GERLING: Yes. So good question. So what you're actually seeing there, this is actually full integration with our prism materials laboratories. So we actually offer from the IDX perspective. We integrate and we actually pull in all the materials from our material libraries, and you can get all of the benefits of all of those different materials. All right. Thank you very much, guys.