The Anatomy of Fusion Lifecycle

MICHELLE STONE: All right, let's get started. So welcome, everyone, to AU 2017. I'm pretty honored that you chose your first class to come sit with me and pray for an hour and talk about PLM. It's going to be a pretty fun class, I hope. Once I get started, I'll get less nervous hopefully.

Safe Harbor Statement, got to put it up there, put a little credit to some of my slides. I feel like I should almost have like my Twitter-- the tweets are my own. The views in class are my own, in case I go off script a little bit. I want to give you guys a good overview of Fusion Lifecycle but also give you some of the insight that I've had from my career previously in PLM.

So who are we? So my name's Michelle Stone. I know quite a few of you guys from if you've been working with Fusion Lifecycle for a while. I've changed roles in the past year, so I'm now a customer Success Manager at the Fusion Adoption team. It's really fun. That means I get to help customers get their solutions configured and rolled out to the company, so that their companies can see the success of having this enterprise software out for them.

CRAIG GODFREY: Hi, everybody. Craig Godfrey, I've worked on Fusion Lifecycle. I do a lot with just different aspects of the Fusion products, so some with Fusion 360, some with Fusion Team. Product Owner, just a fancy title for I have my development team that I work with to put features in the product. I worked with Fusion Experience for a little while as well, excited to be here with you guys.

MICHELLE STONE: Yeah, they put a product person in here, so don't say anything too crazy, is that it?

CRAIG GODFREY: You can't say that.

MICHELLE STONE: Oh, sorry, I put that slide up. So a little bit of background, a lot of people think PLM is boring. I don't. I've been in the industry for almost 20 years. So even before they called it PLM I worked in basically aerospace and defense. It used to be like enterprise data management and grew into product data management. And then people realized, well, a lot of what we talk about isn't even in engineering, so they evolved it into a product lifecycle management.

It's kind of interesting for me. Six years ago pretty much today is when they launched the-- that Autodesk was moving into the PLM space, and that's when I had my first interview with Autodesk, so I moved over. So I've been here since the product launched. Previously, I've worked-- this is actually the fourth PLM that I've worked on as an administrator. As a user, there's a couple other ones I've seen in my career.

So I'm pretty passionate about PLM. I am not passionate about public speaking. So I promise that once I get going and in the product, I'll calm down. I just wanted to let you know, this is a beginners class. I know I've got some folks in here that have been using our product for a while. I think you'll still find a lot of value in here, especially when we get into the product.

We're going to take a look at the new user interface a little bit. Craig's going to talk a little bit about that and maybe help you think about, if you're in the beginning phases of your PLM deployment, think about what are your next steps? What's the next business area you might look at? But again, just want to put the disclaimer, beginners class. I really just want you to know how we use Fusion Lifecycle to address issues that people have in product development.

What else do we have? Key learning objectives, I guess the main one's I want you guys to have fun, new way of looking at PLM, maybe kind of understand the core capabilities of PLM in general. And then how Fusion Lifecycle addresses those core capabilities, spend a little bit of time talking about the relationships, both within the system itself and then the business processes at your company. There's a little more in the handout around approval boards and some of the scripting.

We only have an hour here, so there's only so much we can talk about in an hour. This is kind of fun for me. This is the first time I've done a beginners class. Pretty much since I started, I have been doing mostly administration classes. So my first year, I tried doing a class on relating PLM to like Zen Buddhism. I'm hoping that the analogy works a little better. I thought it was pretty fun.

One other thing I wanted to mention, I've been an admin for our use of Fusion Lifecycle, that whole concept of, I like to call it, [INAUDIBLE]. Some people call it dog food, eating your own dog food. I just don't like dog food. So if you guys have questions, like specific more admin-type questions, I'll be at the answer bar this afternoon, and I'm always happy to talk about that. That's probably where I'm most comfortable is in the admin side of things, but let's get going.

Was I off a slide? I was off a slide. See, I'm used to-- OK. So here's our PLM overview. So I want to give you kind of my view of what I've thought of as PLM. So when I first started, the best explanation I got is think about PLM as cradle to grave information management for everything at your company.

And then another way to think about it is it's all the information that's gathered together for your company to bring their product to market, either from when you're first innovating, when you're first thinking about the product, to when you're actually engineering the product, manufacturing it, and you're making changes to it, and all the way through obsolescence. So it's like a single source of truth. I mean, I'm sure you've heard that before. You know, one stop to put it in there.

Then I came across this actually just about two weeks ago. And I thought this was an interesting definition of PLM. Thinking of it-- now if you guys take a minute, I'm not going to have you read too many slides. I promise we'll be out of slides soon and into the product. One thing I thought really interesting, this is from CIMdata, which is one of the recognized leaders in PLM thought leadership.

And one thing that struck me when I read this definition is you'll notice engineering is not even in there, right? It's mostly talking about a lot of these processes outside of just engineering. Another statistic-- I'm a math geek, so I like statistics. Typically what you'll see at an enterprise deployment with a PLM solution is you have, like, one engineer to, like, 10 people outside of engineering that are using a PLM system to get their information. So a little different from typical Autodesk world, very focused on designing CAD. I just wanted to kind of level set, so I know there's some of you in here, when I reviewed the list, that are brand new to PLM.

All right, so now I want to go through the core capabilities of PLM. And then-- kind of pay attention here. This is where we're going to relate to when we get into the demo part. I'll go back over all of these. Again, a lot of this is just, why are you even spending the money? Why are you spending the time? Why are you deploying a PLM system at your company?

So real quick, I can tell by the badges most of you guys are customers. How many of you are maybe within like a year or less in your PLM journey? So, OK, so quite a few people. I recognize some of you guys have been around a while. Anybody not know what PLM was but was attracted by the lab coat and wanted to hear what I had to say? So you guys are all somewhat familiar with PLM? OK. Somewhat. As I said, I wanted to spend a minute talking about it just to level set everyone.

So I want to talk about what I see as core capabilities of a PLM solution. So new product introduction-- many of you may have heard that, sometimes called new product, like NPD-- New Product Development-- NPI. We're really big on acronyms. I'm going to do my best not to just do acronyms. If I say something you don't know, raise your hand. I was going to have some alphabet soup to hand out, but I didn't lug it to Vegas. Again, I'll try to stay away from that and explain those. But most of the time, you'll hear about this as NPI or NPD. And what does this mean?

This is a way to get all the information that you need to make decisions about what your company is going to work on. I've sometimes heard of it as product portfolio management. So it's a way to organize all the key information about what you want to track against. Stage gate-- you guys may have heard about that. It's a way to have the information in the system so you can do these reviews and make those decisions. Do I want to go forward with this idea and develop this product?

One of the reasons it's good to roll this out at a company is it's a good place to store all the information in one place where everybody can see where you are in that. We'll see that when we look at our workflow maps. You'll get an idea. Maybe you're further down the line in production, you want to see, well, where is this? Have they done any validation testing on it? It's a good place to have, like, checklists for tasks.

It's a really expensive meeting to have everybody come together and say, have you done this yet? No. Yes. If you've got it all in one system and you don't have to call and email people, it's a good way, one source to have it all in there.

Next thing that I wanted to go over, I think most people, this is where you're most familiar with PLM-- item and bill of material management. So that's the core of your system, where you're putting all of the information.

Next bit, change management, kind of goes hand in hand with your bill of material management. Once you have your product out and in the field, if you want to make changes to it, how do you control that? Organizing that whole process-- so change management, you've probably heard this is, is like ECO, ECN, again, other acronyms. Engineering Change Order, Engineering Change Notice-- I remembered to say my acronyms. I've heard it called other things, but those are the main ones you've probably heard about.

Supplier collaboration-- as products are getting more complex, we're seeing more of a need for having a tighter integration with our suppliers. There's a couple of aspects to this with supplier collaboration. Part of it is you approving your suppliers, taking a look, keeping track of them, getting who's supplying what for components on your assembly, tracking that in the system, auditing them, and then also allowing them to come in and use your system. You can allow them access to come in and see so you're making sure they're looking off of the latest information.

The next thing on that is quality management. I think this is where why deploying PLM makes a lot of sense for a lot of companies, is when you think about outside of engineering, we've got a lot of people, their quality systems are usually separate. They know what's going on. And having that whole flow of, maybe having an inspection or return merchandise, and having that spawn a corrective and preventative action, having people take a look at it, and then giving a change request. Well, do we need to do something to this, into the formal change order we just talked about. And that drives the actual change to your product.

So again, the middle of material change management is usually where people start their PLM journeys. Next I typically see customers going into quality management as a next step. And again, depending on what they're manufacturing, if you're working with a lot of contract manufacturers, then you may be looking into that supplier collaboration, getting people into the system. And then I think, yeah. That's a good overview of what PLM does for your company.

So now a few advantages of Fusion Lifecycle-- as I mentioned, I've worked with several other systems. And this is, again-- some of this is my opinion. This is what I like about Fusion Lifecycle and why I'm still here and what excites me about the product, and some of the differences around it. I really like, as I said, everybody has got access to the same information at the same time-- in real time. You know, another problem-- a lot of people are managing their processes just on spreadsheets. So you don't have the latest information. You have to bug somebody. Having it in an enterprise solution just makes it a lot easier.

So some of the things we have-- we're a cloud-based subscription model. It's pretty easy. So a couple you guys may know, I'm the tenant person at Autodesk, so I set up a lot of the sites for people. It takes me a couple minutes, versus when I worked at other companies and had to go onsite, and it would take me two days to install my database and set up my table segments and then install the software. That was a long process.

It's instant on PLM. It really is. It's a simple way, with any of the cloud type products that you have, maybe, in other disciplines-- pretty easy.

Always up-to-date-- what that means is when we have a new release, you'll get it automatically in your system. I spent time-- back in the day I was one of those road warrior consultants. And I would spend six months at a company doing an upgrade from one version to another. So this makes it a lot easier for you. We can talk more about some of the pros and cons to that. But again, it's a real benefit. Also, it removes that IT layer from you guys as well. You kind of get that outsourced when you're buying a cloud product.

Next thing-- access anywhere, mobile device. So I mentioned we use it internally. So I get the typical soccer mom story. You know, we have a workflow process for some of our training classes that we develop. And if I need to approve something, I can get an email on my phone, though, you have to review this workflow and approve it. You can do it from your phone.

The other use case I think that is really compelling about this day and age, which is different from 15 years ago, is you've got people on shop floors doing inspections. Their ability to just access the system and make their documentation, make their notes right through a tablet or a phone, is pretty handy.

Comprehensives-- you know, capabilities. Again, one of the things I like-- we talked about those core capabilities, you know, your change management, your quality. All of those come with your system, which is a little different from some of the other products I've used, where they're different modules. And again, we can talk about it when we talk about turning things on and off. You don't have to use them all at once, but just knowing that they're there and that's not going to be something separate, you're not going to have to have another huge purchase just if you want to roll out quality management or compliance or some of those other ones, it's a little different from what I've seen in the past.

And then here, this is my favorite part, which we're not going to get into much today since we're focused on beginner, but straightforward configuration. You know, you don't have to be a programmer to use it. And I really do mean that. I'm happy to talk to you guys about that. And I have lots of war stories. I'll refrain from telling too many of them now. But let's get into the anatomy of Fusion Lifecycle, all right?

So first we're going to talk about the skeletal system. You guys didn't actually think we're doing anatomy, but we are. So what do I mean by that? So we're going to talk about kind of the bones of the system. You know, what's the underlying structure of your system?

And I relate that to our object model. So what do you have in our system? You have workspaces. And again, if you're brand new to Fusion Lifecycle, we can relate a workspace to a table in the database, you know, a collection of information. We'll talk a little more about it in a second. But that's what I like to think about. You know, the bones of the system is your object model.

So what do we have in there? Like I said, workspaces. That's the term we use here. You know, sometimes you'll hear them called apps. Your collection of information, things that have the same attributes, the same types-- you'll have a workspace for items and BoMs, you'll have a workspace for nonconformance, you'll have a workspace for your change order. And again, all those elements that define that information you'll be collecting are there.

And then where do we go from there? Actually, we'll talk a little bit about fields and picklists. I included this as well. Again, this is a lot of the information that you're going to want to include and collect when you're getting information about those different workspaces.

Let's see, what else? So muscular system-- how does this all tie together? You know, foot bone's connected to the leg bone. Most you probably know that song.

So we have these objects that we have in the object model. Well, how do they relate together? How are they connected? So think about our joints and our connective tissues. And now we're going to talk a little bit about relationships between that. I really like this example because this is kind of the, if I had to do one slide to explain PLM, this is probably the one that I would use for somebody. You've got different things coming together.

So we had these discrete workspaces that we talked about, our inspections, or our return merchandise authorizations, our corrective and preventative actions, all of that information gets tied together and moves into change request, change order. And this is what we're going to walk through in the demo in a second. But again, just another thing-- that thought about muscular system, connection, moving things along, that's what I wanted to convey there.

And then the big part of any PLM system is your bill of material, your product records, your information. So all of these are relationships in the system. Your item kind of sits at the center, and then you've got all these other processes around it. Some of these, you'll see, is like a bill of material information. Some of it's just item, like item information, any related documentation.

OK, next we have cardiovascular system. I think the Latin for heart is something like "core." So it's kind of like the core of the system, in my opinion, is workflow. It's one of the core capabilities of any PLM system. So I kind of had this as an analogy to the heart. It's kind of what drives the blood through the system.

So the workflow, I think of it as driving these business objects through the various states of a system. So a quick little overview of the workflow, and then we'll get into the tools soon, I promise. I like our workflow engine, mostly because it's fairly easy to configure. From an end user perspective, it's pretty easy for an end user to see what's going on.

I always tell customers when I'm working with them, I think of it as kind of like a treasure map. You can go to that screen and see well, where are you in that process? I'll make sure we look at NPI. We'll go into product development. I think that's one that's really important where you can kind of see where it is in its flow. There's a lot of goodness that comes out of using enterprise software where you can just have those notifications so people know what's going on, you know, delegate things, things like that.

The other part of using workflow rather than sending emails and things like that is you've got that traceability. You've got that change log of who did what, where, why? It's all captured in the system. It's really important in certain industries, you know, if you're, I mean, obviously, med device, or in general, if somebody made the change, you want to know why. So you've got that ability to capture that there.

Respiratory system-- can take a breath. All right, so what is PLM? We've defined it. We've talked about it. I want to talk about the L in PLM-- Lifecycle. So the concept is the lifecycle breathing life into your system. I'm kind of stretching here with the anatomy correlations, but I'm trying.

So just like the lungs inhale and exhale, your objects are going to go through a different series throughout. You know, you'll start out when you're first designing it, you'll go, and you'll release it. Or you might have some pre-release revisions of it. You release it, you might release it again, and at some point, it'll go into obsolescence. So that's kind of the lifecycle that your products will take in the workspace. So kind of workflow and lifecycle go hand-in-hand. And we'll see that in just a second.

All right, nervous system-- I was hoping I wouldn't still be nervous by the time we got here, but I guess that's not. So the nervous system's responsible for communicating, right? So think about it as like a network of electrical pathways. In PLM, I think of this as notifications, so sending the right information to people as they need it.

Not going into the admin tool too much, but we'll talk about the high level. You have that ability of letting people know when they have work to do. There's some best practices in that, making sure that you're just notifying the people who need to know, who have action. We can talk about that a little more, and what happens when you don't do that, when you notify everybody or nobody? That would be good, the sidebar conversation for you guys to have with one another.

There are also some bits in our notifications. People can subscribe to these. We have the ability to send reminders. If you're the bottleneck, if you haven't done your work, you can set it up so you get a reminder. So make sure you do it. Escalation-- let's say Kim didn't do her job. We can have it automatically escalate so I'll get notified. I also like the delegation. So I'm pretty sure I'm going to go on vacation and delegate all my work to Craig over there.

CRAIG GODFREY: It's risky.

MICHELLE STONE: All right, and then next-- dermal system. So talking about our skin, you know, it's more than just a pretty face. So just like our skin gets sloughed off occasionally, sometimes you need to update the look of your software. So those of you who have been using the system for a while know that we're working on a new modern interface. It's not just to make it a pretty face. It's to really go and enable some of the latest web technologies, and then also have a common experience across any of the Autodesk products.

I think you guys know we had a name change. Some of you have been here a while. We used to be PLM 360. Now we're Fusion Lifecycle. So we're part of the larger Fusion platform. So part of this effort of updating the UI was to just give it a common look and feel. So those of you that never used the system, here's just a little comparison, of what it used to look like to what it looks like now.

I don't know. I think that's probably, we're-- so I spent a lot of time talking about how all of these different discrete systems are there. So let's put it all together. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of talking. So I'm going to give it over to Craig. Let's see if my pointer works.

CRAIG GODFREY: Can you see the product up there?

MICHELLE STONE: Looks like a lifecycle to me.

CRAIG GODFREY: All right. So just real quick, we're just going to walk through the interface. I'll just kind of describe what's there. And then we'll jump into some examples, and Michelle will talk through, kind of matching what she said on her previous slides.

So this is the dashboard, kind of your home when you log into the system. Basically, you have different things you can track. So there's different charts. So all the data that you're putting in there, you can build into charts and take a look at those. So it does that quickly, some chart information.

The my outstanding work area is basically if there's work that you have actions or may have actions that you need to do, specific to you, those will show up in the list. Bookmarks-- just being able to put your favorites. I need to quickly get the things that I'm working on every day. I can put those in. And then, obviously tracking your recently viewed items as well. So that's kind of just your home base, search up at top.

Again, as Michelle mentioned, being part of Fusion family, a lot of it is trying to be kind of that cohesive experience. So if you go to Fusion Team or if you've been in Fusion 360, kind of have that same feel. Search bar's over the right, your user profile is over there-- just trying to get that same general experience.

In the upper corner there we have the menu. So we talked about different workspaces containing different items or different things that you want to track. So here we have our workspaces, so product development, Michelle mentioned, change management. So you have different categories that you might have. And then within them-- let's go to one. Let's go to the products.

You go into a workspace, you can see all the information about that workspace. There could be 12 items in this case, based on filters that you've created. So you could have saved filters. One of the newer UI ideas was to have a WYSIWYG style, you know, as you build your view. So you could come in here--

MICHELLE STONE: WYSIWYG-- What You See Is What You Get.

CRAIG GODFREY: Yeah, see? Once again, using another one. See? I'm bad.

MICHELLE STONE: That's what I'm here for.

CRAIG GODFREY: Yeah. So you can just kind of build out different filters if you have a lot of data here, you can get it down to one-- so different filter concepts going into an item that you want to track.

The layout-- basically, you have a split view so that if you have a lot of items, you can quickly get to those and see different information down the side here. And as you click on one, you get to see its detail, so you can kind of review that quickly. Kind of the main area up at the top is, if you're looking at the CNC router, what are things that you can do to it? So you have different commands that you can do. You could clone it to make a new one. There's scripts or additional actions that you can build for this, or you could archive it if you no longer need it.

You have workflow, which we'll talk about. It can tell you what state that this item's in. And then the tabs here are just, there's different aspects that you may have that you need to track as well, attachments, other documents that are important that you might have to add, the build materials, the workflow that Michelle talked about as well. So that's all of the areas here.

And then, obviously, the main details of the item-- so all this can be customized to match what you need. So Michelle mentioned picklists and such. There's different types, just a number field, text fields. You can build this how you need to.

And so that's basically the main interface, just to kind of give you a quick run-through.

MICHELLE STONE: Sounds good. Now I get to tell Craig how to drive. This will be kind of fun.

So a couple of things that he mentioned that I wanted to reiterate-- one thing that's good we talked about is a configurable solution. So you don't have to change your business process to use our tool. You can change the tool to match what you need. Again, pretty straightforward to do so-- you probably have existing systems. Like I said, maybe you have spreadsheets, maybe you have homegrown systems, legacy systems. You can go and take a look at what information is captured there and mimic it here in the system. It makes end user training a little easier if you're using the same information. So you can go in and change any of those labels as you need it.

I'm going to have you go back to the dashboard. I'm going to point out a few things. So one of the-- some of you guys maybe were in the purchasing decision. Do you want to expand charts for me?

CRAIG GODFREY: Sure.

MICHELLE STONE: But you may not be. Somebody high up in your company decided they wanted to make the investment in an enterprise solution like PLM. And a lot of it what they care about is things like these charts. They want to get this information. So you'll have some people who will only come in and only look at their dashboard. And again, this gives them real time information of what's going on in the system. Again, different from looking at Excel or looking at a PowerPoint slide, if something changed, if we have another change order that came in, if we had another supplier that we had to deactivate, they'll have real time information around that. I just wanted to point that out.

So let's go back and talk about the core capabilities we mentioned. We talked about new product introductions. So Craig, I'm going to have you go back to-- we can look at our recently viewed items. We can go back to the CNC router, go back to one of the products. You can just go to anything. I want to talk a little bit about the information that you're tracking for NPI. I'll have you go to the workflow tab real quick. And this will resonate.

You've probably heard about stage gates, having people review before you move something along. So this is, a lot of times, your ideation, your innovation. This is where you'll capture ideas.

I'm working with a customer now where this is where they're starting their PLM journey. They're setting it up for their product's workspace. So anybody at the company-- their sales team or marketing team-- if they have ideas, this is a way to capture it. And before the company invests money in it, they're using this as kind of like their portfolio management tool. People can put in a lot of different ideas. They can track some different information on that main page, and then think about, well, they'll have these review cycles, well, what do I want to approve? What do I want to work on?

I'm going to have you navigate back to the details page, talk a little bit about the concept of tasks, assigning things to people. So I'm going to have you navigate to that tasks template. Yeah, perfect. And another tab. Any of you guys have been on the phone with me now I'm a little tab happy. I'll have a bunch of tabs open. I just like it because it makes it a little easier.

So this concept of task templating is-- yeah, I'll have you go to the grid tab. You can make a list of what's everything that needs to get done for us to review and decide to work on this project? And then notifying the people who have to do that-- so you can set this up as a list of, OK, these are the things that need to be done in the concept stage, these are the things we need to do in development.

I think when Craig had the main page up, he had that my outstanding work, and I think I had a red mark on there. I hadn't done anything yet. But this is a way to notify the people when they come into work, what do they need to work on? And there's just a good way to track all of that. So that's good for NPI.

Next thing we talked about, so you've gone through, you've looked at it, you want to build this product. So we'll go into-- if you want to go back to the router and item and BoM workspace. I'm competing with music over there. Now you guys are regretting not going to the dance party class.

So again, you know, bill of material-- like, your item master information. If you click on one-- oh, he's going to search for a router. So he's showing you how you can filter this down. I mean, this is just a demo set, so I don't have-- 500 parts, it's probably not the real. Your company probably has a lot more than that. So yeah, being able to filter that-- you probably may have heard of that as like a save search in other tools. I think Salesforce, we called them views.

At your company, you're probably using several different enterprise software platforms. I'm not going to talk about integration in here, but that's another big piece of this puzzle. Usually you'll talk about you'll have your PLM system. And there, you need to talk to your ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning. You also probably may have an integration to a CRM system, your customer database, maybe like a maintenance repair. That's an important part of PLM too. And that's a whole other conversation to have, on what belongs where in which system. If you ever want to rile up a PLM or ERP person, you start talking about that or intelligent part numbers. You'll get all feathers ruffled.

But again, I'm going to have you go to the bill of material tab real quick. I think this one has a-- yeah. Oh, you're going to to go to the working version? Good, thank you.

So bill of material. Again, ways to look at this-- we talked before that you may have different people coming in and looking at your information in the system. We have a way that we can set up different views. Right now we're looking at a supply chain view, so you can configure what information do you want to show people who are looking at the system? I think we have a couple of them there, a supply chain. Maybe you're in compliance. You care about, like, REACH and RoHS.

And I probably couldn't remember RoHS. But I'm going to leave that as an acronym for you guys to look up. Regulatory something-- but anyway. The story we were talking about before, where like maybe we had an inspection or somebody said, hey, there's something wrong with this router. I need you to take a look at it. I'm not going to walk through the whole connecting and spawning those workspaces together. But what if we needed to make a change to this leg?

Craig's going to walk us through real quick how you could-- let's say you've done your due diligence. You've checked your inventory. You need to make a change to this object. You can do that pretty quickly by just attaching this to a change order.

So now we're going to that next core capability that we talked about. We talked about item and bill of material management. Now we're talking about change management. So Craig's just going to really quick-- can you do CCV please. Can you stop for one second?

And we'll talk about this in a second. One of the things I had in the course outline is the concept of approval boards. This makes it a little easier, where you can pre set up who needs to review those changes. You still have the ability to add ad hoc people. But generally, you probably have change analysts or people that are responsible for looking at changes in your system. So he's going to go ahead and create that change order for me.

And then he'll go ahead and set that lifecycle state. You know, we talked about lifecycle before. Is this a revision, or am I done with this? Am I obsoleting it? You can go ahead and make those changes.

Those of you that have been using the classic UI, have you guys used modern yet? Or no? Good. So you learned something in the class, got to see something new. I was a little worried when I saw all the people, there are several of you guys that have been around Fusion Lifecycle for a while.

Makes it a little easier to get you change order set up-- and then again, we have that approval workflow. Actually, I'm going to have you go to the details tab real quick, Craig. I talked a little bit about that concept of approval boards. If he goes and looks at that team-- I can go and have him open that up-- I have a separate reference workspace where I'm just defining who needs to make these changes, who needs you review it. So Craig and I have to approve it in stage one. And then after, we have like a CCV process. I get to do it. I'm being nice to Craig. I'm not giving him too much work.

But again, you have that ability to set up different approval boards in that. So yeah, so we kind of came back from quality management, talked a little bit about suppliers. How are we on time? I could just talk all day about PLM. But I think we need to go back to-- we're going to go back to some slides. I just wanted to give you an overview of some of the core capabilities that you're trying to solve while you're getting a good overview of your product information. This isn't what it looks like when you're doing it in the system.

So I don't know. My clicker's just not working for me today. That's OK. All right. Been a lot to digest, hasn't it?

All right, it might sound a little gross, but every system has inputs and outputs, right? So in PLM, we can think of this in terms of import, export, consume, take that information in, and then you dump it out in a variety of formats. This is one of these near and dear to my hearts. This is the first area I worked in when I first started working in PLM. I was responsible for importing. They were stopping using an Access database and trying to get all of that information into the PLM system.

So there's tools for that. So those of you that are just starting your PLM journey, easy way for you to get information into the system. One of the things I like about our solution is you can actually, through our permission model, you can have a power user. You can train people to do this so you as the admin don't have to do all of it. I think that's pretty nice.

Do you like my little LEGO X-Wing in there? I'm doing a LEGO robotics team this year, so I'm all about LEGOs lately.

Then the other big thing-- I mean, I mentioned it when we looked at the dashboard, you know, charts, reports. A lot of that's the reason why you're deploying PLM at your company, right, because people want to get information. So there's a variety of different formats for that. I use the reports and the importing hand-in-hand quite a bit.

So true story-- last week I was onboarding a new customer. And we made a change to the workspace. We added a field. So we needed to go back and update all the existing records. We added a picklist, because they want to report against it. So they wanted to be able to create a report for their boss that said, well, this is from this program, this is from this program. And they haven't thought about it first. So you can create a quick little report, dump out all the information in your workspace, add the information in, and update all the records. Again, that's a whole topic in itself. Just wanted to let you guys know that that's available.

Next up, we're back into anatomy for the autonomic system. So this is kind of like the brains of your system, right? So this is how you can extend the capabilities of the solution through scripting. Again, not a scripting class-- I can talk a little more. There's some other detailed integration and scripting type classes if you're interested in that. But autonomic systems, this was a new one for me when I was doing my preparation for the class-- things like your heartbeat, your chemical regulation, glandular secretion, all that. So to enable some of this automation, you can use scripting.

So we talk a little bit about scripting here. Again, war story-- one of the things I like about our solution is our scripting, it's just JavaScript based. Other solutions I used were proprietary scripting languages. So what's really nice about this-- I'm not a real programmer. I mean, I did programming in some of my classes in college. But I'm certainly not like the people I sit next to. I sit in the office with the people who are developing, like, the Fusion platform, and Inventor. And they're real programmers.

I'm not a real programmer. But I can take a program that somebody else has written and tweak it as I need it. You know, with JavaScript, there's a lot of tools online-- W3 Schools, Code Academy. But you've got different trigger points in the system where you can chain things together, have it do things. You know we talked about that whole flow in quality management, where you might have a kappa that spawns a change request that spawns a change order? All of that can be done in the system so people don't have to manually create a new change request. They can go and do a workflow action that says OK, yeah, there's a problem with this component, transition it, and boom. It'll go and create that record and copy over the relevant information.

Again, that kind of helps with the data integrity. Why do you use scripting? Why do you use picklists? It's so you can report against it, so you have the information in there correctly. As I said, there's different types. You can make sure, if you have, like, your validation groups, make sure people have put in all the relevant information that the next person in the flow has what they need so that you won't allow them to move it unless you have that.

Action script-- if somebody moves this, do something. You know, maybe I want to email this person. Maybe I want to create a new record. So there's things like that in there.

Library scripts is another area I wanted to talk about. There's a lot of them that are in there already when you get the system. So we talked a little bit about NPI and that concept of creating tasks. You might want to create milestones so people can track where are they at? How close are they to being done? You can just employ one of the library scripts, and they'll just set it up for you anytime you need it. So I just wanted to point out some of that was in there.