Item-Centered Vault: Best Practices and Tips for a Smooth Transition from a File-Centered Vault

ALLEN GAGER: Welcome to "Item-Centric Vault-- Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks for a Smooth Transition from a File-Centric Vault."

We've got our safe harbor statement. We're all familiar with this now. Anything that we might speak to from a future perspective may or may not happen. The main takeaway is let's not make purchasing decisions on the content that you see today.

The target audience for this class is Vault users that are not using items. Maybe you're considering Vault, and you're curious about it, or maybe Vault users that have a Vault and they're using items, but they need a little help, a little tips and tricks.

This is not an "Everything about Items" class. We are unable to teach you everything you need to know about items in the short time that we have today. But we're going to give you the highlights of things you need to look out for and what you need to pay attention to.

Here is our agenda for the class. We're going to start out with who we are, with who you are, what's the difference between a file-centric and an item-centric Vault environment, some of the benefits of using items, and then considerations for transforming.

So to start with, my name is Allen Gager. I am a solution engineer with Autodesk. I've been with Autodesk for just a little bit over 8 years. I've spent approximately 30 years in industry doing advanced machine design and complex tooling. And my co-host today, Kim, why don't you take it and introduce yourself?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Thanks, Allen. I'm Kimberly Hendrix with Team D3 out of Oklahoma. I am the vice president of professional services for Team D3 and have been working in data management and engineering processes for-- I'll date myself-- well over 30 years.

In the past 15 or 16 years with Team D3, I've implemented and consulted on many, many data management systems and those things. And so I'm happy to be here with you, Allen.

ALLEN GAGER: Great. Thank you, Kim. So just thinking a little bit about a file-centric Vault, and an Item-centric Vault, first off, if you're using Vault Basic, I will assure you are in a file-centric Vault environment.

You might be using Vault Workgroup as well. Even though that process, that product has been sunsetted, we know there's still some of you out there with Vault Workgroup. You are in a file-centric environment. Those of you with Vault Professional, you may be in either environment. And we're going to talk more about that as we go through today.

On the file-centric side lifecycle states affect the file. It's drawing that model that we're focusing on and where we're putting our energy. And in a file-centric environment, there's typically no bill of materials that are stored in Vault.

And when we're talking about bill of materials, in the context of today, we're going to be talking about the CAD Bill of Materials, or the bill of materials that emanates from tools like Inventor, our friends over at SolidWorks, which we support in Vault, AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical, those CAD documents that we can get the bill materials from.

On the other side of it from the Item-centric environment, we're going to focus a little more on the item itself. We're going to focus on the lifecycle states of that item. And then, also, we're going to talk a little bit, but it's important to know that lifecycle states on items and lifecycle states on files are unique and independent.

We'll talk a little bit about change orders as we move through because they can happen on items and/or files. And then we're going to spend a little bit of time on the bill of materials stored in Vault.

So, Kim, what do you think? Should we define an item for the crew?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: We should define an item because I was thinking, as we're going through here, what exactly is an item, and how does it affect it? And I love this slide, so I'll let you talk about why you picked this particular image.

ALLEN GAGER: So this is from our media and entertainment group. And I just love the stuff that those folks do over there. And I'm going to circle back to this slide, this intro slide, to an item. I think I want to explain it next in the context of an item is a container.

So if we think about this as a bucket that I can put an object in-- so that object might be an Inventor model. It might be an Inventor Drawing. It might be an AutoCAD drawing or an AutoCAD Mechanical drawing.

It's really a container or-- and you're going to hear this a couple times-- a vehicle to move data. So if we're going to go back to that image of the car with the tree growing up through it, the car is a container.

I can put things in it. I can put objects. I can put people in it. I can put my pets in it. And I can take it somewhere and connect it to something.

And I love the tree because the whole reason we're here is that, well, sometimes, things get in the way of what we want to do and where we want to go, and that's what we want to help sort out. Let's get you on the path to items, that vehicle, that container, that can connect you to the rest of your business without the impediments of this poor person's vehicle here.

So, Kim, so let's talk about some of the things on the list here. We kind of talked about the explanation of an item, but why don't you take what the items can link to, what they can be used for, what they can represent?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: So items are, again, this vehicle that we can put all this information in. And that information can come from the multiple different places, like Allen talked about. It can come from the file, it can come from a Word file or a PDF, but it can also come from nothing.

So it can be just created to represent for your bill of materials that goes on down your path for something like paint or grease. I've even seen people use an item for hours that it takes to do things, which is a little outside of the box, but it just goes to show that that information can be contained and used however your system needs it.

And then it takes on a life of its own. In itself, as its lifecycle moves forward or inside a bill of material, which that whole lifecycle moves forward, it takes on a life of its own. So it can be any or all of those things. And usually, in the grand scheme of a bill of material, it's a little bit of all of those things. Yeah.

ALLEN GAGER: Great, thank you. So the last one, why are items fun for the whole family? I put this in there because we're really thinking about connecting engineering to the rest of the business. So it might not actually be fun for the whole family, but it is part of the family. It's part of the business, part of the enterprise. And we'll talk about that a little more as we kind of move through.

So I have an example of items. When we introduced model states in Inventor, it gives us the opportunity to have various design versions within a single file. So the example that I have in the screen here is a single Inventor file, but there's a differing number of veins in that object there.

And each one of those different iterations is a different part number. It's a different description. But there's a single file that can be represented by multiple item numbers.

So this is one example of how we might use items with an Inventor bill of material. And then kind of thinking about this-- and we're going to talk more about connecting to the enterprise. Kim, is there anything that you'd like to add around items?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Yeah, this is a really nice feature if you're using Model States because you think about how we've come from 2D to 3D over the last 20 years. And before, we would have to draw this drawing-- for all six or seven of those items, we'd have to draw it each time and have six or seven files out there to [? eliminate ?] those.

And now we don't. We can have one model that represents those 6 or 7 or 10, how many ever you want, versions of that file. And we can pick and choose those for the BOM, and it simplifies our life going forward. So that's just one of the benefits of using items and not just relying on file-centric CADs.

ALLEN GAGER: So thinking about that and all the thousands of Vaults that you and your team have installed, how many times have you come across where there might be a model, but it gets a different paint color, and they redraw that model to represent that different paint color?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Absolutely. They do it so often. It's the ways of the past, and we're consulting away from that now to help streamline things. But for every paint color, for every time they're going to change the bolt hole size, for every time they're going to change any of those things that were configurable in model states, it adds another file and another thing that we have to manage. And doing it this way, with items, we don't have to do that takes all that way. It really simplifies it once you get that setup clean.

ALLEN GAGER: So if we think about-- and, again, we're going to focus-- we'll talk more about this throughout the class. But the bill of materials from CAD, well, what does that look like?

In this case, we have a representation of a CAD drawing, the CAD models. We've got the documentation with it. It can come from different sources. As you know, Vault supports our friends over at Dassault SolidWorks and PTC Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical, a whole host of others.

But there's other people outside of engineering, other interests outside of engineering. So we've got product lifecycle management, resource management. Kim, any thoughts on-- we talked about coming from CAD, but any thoughts or comments on that other data from other sources?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: So we bring it all together. And what we've got to figure out is, who's the customer of that data? And I'm not talking about your end customer that's using the part that you're building or whatever in the field. I'm talking about, if you're in engineering, and you've put all this data together, and you brought it together from all these various different places-- you may have downloaded it from Inventor-- or from a vendor, I'm sorry. You may have created it in Inventor.

You may have gotten it from a outside source that comes in at SolidWorks. And you've built this bill of material. And where does that data go? Who needs it next, and who's the customer on that data?

And that's what items help us do is bring that on down the line and remove all that non-value-added tasks in, re-entering it and rechecking it and redoing it every time we have to touch that. So keep in mind as we go through there is, who is the customer of this data, and where is it going?

ALLEN GAGER: I think that's a great point. In fact, I want to-- as we move through, I want to pick up some places where we can highlight the importance of that.

From this perspective, one of the things-- this is my Vault. I've got an Inventor model here. And I'm just going to go ahead and assign some items to this Inventor model.

I'm going to grab all the drawings, grab all the related information. It really only takes a couple clicks to get that item bill of material from the CAD model within Vault. And then we can start working with it and dealing with it from there.

So in this case, I'm just going to create the BOM. I'm going to save it. I'm not going to do any particular editing in the context of our class today. But I now, just with a little quick click, have assigned items and collected that bill of material. And, again, it's that container that I can now start to ferry this information off to, as Kim put it, the customer.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Yeah, something to note on that is if you looked at that as he went through it, it created the item of the main assembly. But when he went to the bill of material, if the items of all those parts aren't already created, it will do those as well from that level. So it gives you that option to create those subassembly parts as we go through. So that's really a nice feature. So you don't have to go through each part first and then the assembly. So it makes it a little quicker.

ALLEN GAGER: And I want to actually-- well, we'll get to pro tips in a moment. I had a thought there as we're working through this, and I'm going to save it.

So why change? So a lot of times, from my solution engineer role at Autodesk, I'm speaking with customers that are adding Vault because they need all the wonderful things that Vault can do, or I'm starting to engage with customers that they've had Vault, and they need more.

And kind of from an engineering perspective, we're thinking, well, why change? Why are we doing this? Why are we moving from my Vault that is file-centric-- I have hundreds of thousands of files or maybe millions of files. Why?

The biggest factors-- and there's a couple of them. First off, IDP research has shown that roughly-- I'm sorry, IDC, international Data Corporation, they did a study. About 80% of data, business-created data, just simply goes unused.

I have a colleague that he's got-- he says, oh, data goes to die. Well, we need to leverage and use that data. As we all know, AI is having a moment. And AI is fed by data. So how do we unlock this data to feed the business, feed the opportunities, feed AI?

And, again, items are the vehicle to transport, transfer that information. So that's one of the reasons that we're talking about this.

This slide, I could-- we got a lot of Vault users. You've seen this slide when you were determined to adopt Vault and get rid of some of those non-value-added processes. We've got people that need to search, find data, all of those things.

This is true from an item perspective as well. So I've got my engineering data in Vault. I've got my revisions. I've got the right data for the right people at the right time. But I'm still missing my targets. And why am I missing my targets?

So, Kim, thinking about this, so our friends that aren't in the item world yet, where is some of that time leaking? We've got a great Vault. It's stable. It's happy. Engineering is happy. But these stats on the screen-- where is that time going?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Well, if we're not using items, and we're just simply keeping Vault in the engineering department-- which is basically what a file-centric Vault is, it keeps it in engineering-- then all that data is not transferring all the way down the line. And so our new product introduction people, they don't have that correct information at the right time.

They're having to call us to get the prints. They're having to call us to get the bill of materials. We're having to re-enter those bill of materials, or somebody is having to re-enter those bill of materials into the next process and the next process. And then, when a change happens, going back to the old drafting board days, when we used to take and compare the drafting, the I can draw this faster by hand or I can draw it in AutoCAD back in the day.

And sure, a good drafter could beat him on that first time. But the first time we make a change, we've blown them out of the water because that data follows along with this. And I think this is the same thing is we've got to get that data where it flows seamlessly from one stage to the next, and that helps with all these targets.

They're not missing out on changes. They're not missing out on bill of material changes. They're not missing out on typos and getting the wrong thing at the shop at the wrong time, because that data flows seamlessly from point A to point Z and a customer, so.

ALLEN GAGER: I love that 2D to 3D analogy because, well, I was there, too, because again, I came from industry. But it did. It took-- there might have been a couple extra clicks up front, but we got so much more on the back end.

So really, what you're talking about is we got a great start, but let's get a little more out of that effort that we put in. I think-- and this next one comes up, and it's going to kind of circle back to-- actually, I'm a slide ahead, so forgive me.

Here's the other part of it. And you're going to be hearing this. You're going to be-- if you're at AU or you're watching these videos after AU, you're going to hear a lot about digital transformation.

This is the hot button for executives right now in that, how do we get more out of our data? I mentioned a few moments ago, AI is having a moment, and learning how to leverage that data lake and make it meaningful to us.

If we think about from a Vault perspective, we're definitely-- we're in here. We've got a file-centric Vault. We've got our revisions. We've got our lifecycles. Maybe we're using some change orders. Our data is secure. We're not stepping on anybody.

Life is pretty good. The shop is feeding themselves. They're not coming into engineering and bothering engineering because they can't find a print and all the things that go along like that. So this is good. Life is good here.

But management starts wanting to get up this ladder. We need to be more informed. And ultimately, if we start leveraging the data and connecting it to systems, then we can start making intelligent decisions off of that data and be more proactive, more predictive.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: And we refer to this at Team D3 as the data maturity ladder, just a different way to look at it. And so most of the people that have a file-centric Vault are down on the first rung. And they're aware, they've got management, and they might be using some stuff on the second rung. But they're certainly not getting to the third rung, because we're not transferring that data back and forth cleanly. So you can think of it as a maturity or a digital transformation or a ladder. It kind of all leads to each other.

ALLEN GAGER: So in thinking about that, in the customers that you consult with, and let's not-- we'll not name any names, but have you seen any night-and-day changes that come to mind where maybe you took a customer from that initial journeys into where they are truly connected and, I'll just say, living the life?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Well, we're in the-- we've done it for several customers over the past, and, again, I won't mention names. There's some AU classes in the past about some of them. And I've got a class on Thursday, which is a case study with the customer that's in the middle of this process.

So it's really kind of a fun way to take what you've learned here and see what we've done there. They went from network drives and 2D all at once to 3D in the Vault and converting it and connecting it with PLM.

So they're fast going up this maturity ladder. That's going on this year at AU as well. And so we've done several of them like that.

And it's really eye-opening to see and rewarding to see the customers go, man, I can get my hands on the data. And once I do my part of it, the next person sees it and runs with it, and it transfers automatically, and it gets to the next stage, it's really fun to watch that maturity grow.

It's like watching your baby grow. It's really fun to see their eyes open on what they can do with all that data that they have.

ALLEN GAGER: And I think that that's a great segue to this is at the end of the day, engineering needs to be more connected. The business is needing to scale.

We saw this slide a few ago that we're just spending some time in places maybe that we don't need to or shouldn't. We still have manual entry, data entry, competitive pressure that's never going to go away.

How can we do better than the people across the street that are trying to take our business? And Kim and I went back and forth on this a little bit. We've both been in this space for a long time.

And we often hear a single source of truth. But the reality is that there's multiple sources of truth. My CAD model is a source of truth. My ERP system is a source of truth. And really, now what we're talking about is providing access to that truth.

So if you're attending Autodesk University or you're reviewing the classes of Autodesk University and the content that's going to live on for years and years to come, as you listen to and see and experience the data platforms and the connected data ecosystem, it's really about not worrying about the owner of the truth.

It's, can you have access? Can you use it? Can you do something with it and trust it?

So we're going to move away, at least in this session, of saying the single source of truth. But when we're talking about items in a file-centric Vault and that connectivity, it's really providing the truth across your business. Anything you want to add color to, clarify there?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: No, I agree. You know, we talked about that at length when we were preparing this. And I've always used that single source of truth. But anymore, that's not the case.

20 years ago, the CAD models, or the drawings back in the day, were the source of truth, and we ran the whole business off of that. And that's not the case anymore. We need to be able to pluck that information from where it lies and bring it into one place and have access to it from one place where everybody can trust that they're getting the latest information across the board, and they can move forward with clarity and no fear of getting hold of the wrong information.

So, yeah, I think the systems being connected and stay connect to data and having access to all that truth across the board is going to be the future. That's how AI works, right? If you think about where does-- how does AI work and all the data, it's pulling it from all the places that the data is owned from, and it's putting it in front of you in one place. It's the new search engine for us.

ALLEN GAGER: It kind of feels to me like you're saying this.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: I am.

ALLEN GAGER: How did I know that?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: I don't know.

ALLEN GAGER: Just to tie it back a little bit, this is where we are at today. Data has never been more important. And it's never had more attention.

So you all came here to this recording, to this class, to figure out, what's in it for me? And I know everybody is thinking all of the things on the slide here.

Do I have to change how I work? Do I have to itemize everything. I've got 5 million files in my Vault. I've never used items. What do I do?

So now we're into the class. We're going to kind of break stuff down a little bit. And, Kim, I'm going to hand this over to you because you've done so many of these transitions, so many of these installs, if you could take a moment to just shed some light on maybe each of these points.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: I can do that. So do I have to change how I work? Yeah, you're going to have to a little bit-- minor tweaks and adjustments to your example. Just like when we went from 2D to 3D back in the day, yeah, we had to change the way we drew it, but we get so much information out of it, we're going to have to add a couple more clicks, design in a little bit smarter, more efficient way.

But I think, once you make that transition, you won't even notice the changes. So, yes, but minor. Do we have to itemize everything? That kind of depends on your workflow.

We always recommend that you start on what's making you money today and what's going to make you money tomorrow and then go from there. I've had some companies that say, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to go-- we're going to itemize everything, and we're going to go from there.

But they're not really getting much bang for their buck on that old stuff that they haven't touched in 15 years and probably won't. So we have to do some discussions around what is smart to do when we talk about converting files to items. And if you've never used items, I think you'll like it once you get into it.

It opens up a whole new era of information and-- I don't want to say complexity, because it's really not. It really simplifies the BOM, where you don't have to export that to Excel and then add a bunch of stuff to it to send it to the next person. It's going to keep it clean all in one system.

And then who can help us? There's a whole system of resellers and consultants in the Autodesk ecosystem that can help you that are good at this and can do these kind of transitions for you.

We do a lot of them. Some of our competitors in the resellers world, they do a lot of them. And as long as you get help and you know, and you trust the consultant that you work with, you can be successful in this transition.

ALLEN GAGER: And I think that's a key element there because-- and, again, just working from my perspective, from an Autodesk viewpoint, I have the pleasure and privilege to work with a huge group of talented resellers across our ecosystem. And the one thing I can tell you is that they bring-- they've seen everything.

I love a thing that Kim brings home more often than not. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. They've seen the things that just really work best.

So definitely, we're going to circle back to that a little bit because there's a couple other points where we want to get you engaged with that help. Thinking about just getting started-- and I'm going to back up a moment and pause.

For our friends that have Vault and they've been using it for a while, there's some change. There's some transition, some learning, some retraining. There's some clicks.

If you are new to Vault, I would encourage and implore you that just know you're going to want to connect to the rest of the ecosystem at some point. So when you're sitting down with your value-added reseller that you are laying out that milestone that I am going to connect this Vault, and I want to get started with items so I don't have to backtrack and choose different workflows later.

Let's just get you set up, and know that those reasons for change that we discussed, connected to the business, external pressures, all of those things, that's not going to go away. So let's get you positioned from the very start to engage with those other activities when you're ready without having to do any retooling or retraining.

So let's do some just quick what to know. First off-- and, again, I'm going to have you chime in on a couple of these as well. So I'm going to say, let's get with your reseller and do a Vault health check. Let's make sure that everything is working the way it should.

When's the last time that you checked that your backups are valid? When's the last time that you restored your Vault in a sandbox? Do you have a sandbox to make tweaks to changes in workflows so that you're not interrupting your production Vault?

So there's a task list for that, a blueprint for that. So let's do a physical on your Vault. What are you using Vault for? Is it just to check in, check out? Are you leveraging engineering change orders? Do you require or force engineering change orders. Are you using lifecycles? So we want to spend some time, again, with your reseller to understand what your workflows are.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: [? Those are ?] before workflows, how you're doing it now and how you see it in a perfect world, if you could push an easy button and you're six or eight months down the road, what would it be like then, we need to know both of those so that we can work in that direction.

ALLEN GAGER: Yeah, when's the last time you sat-- and I love doing this from an Autodesk perspective, and we call it different things. And we do it in conjunction with our partners is those documented discoveries.

We get the stakeholders in the room, and we sit down and figure out-- Kim, you had mentioned, who is the customer of this data? Well, we get those customers in the room to understand what they really need and want.

I can't tell you how many times we've been through it, and somebody is doing all these workflows and steps that they thought some other department needed or wanted, and they don't.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: They don't need it. It is a non-value-added task at that point.

ALLEN GAGER: Yeah, just-- not to quote the movie Office Space, but did you do your TPS reports? Well, we've got a lot of folks doing those things that don't need to be. So we want to review that. We want to go through.

Any thoughts on the issues in the Vault, Kim? Anything that you and your team have seen were where you would say, oh, hey, we have to fix this before we touch another thing?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: The main thing before we start adding items into the Vault is because the items are just data. They are SQL data, and the back end of the Vault is SQL.

And so we just need to make sure that your SQL is clean and that we're running through all those checks and balances to make sure that your database is clean, it can be cleanly backed up, it's optimized and all that.

That's the main thing we have to do. If you're getting errors on check-in and check-out, then there's an issue with your Vault that we need to clean before we add more things on the top of that.

ALLEN GAGER: Yeah. And other things, like, is your job processor throwing nontip error reports all over the place? So there's things we want to just-- first of all, you should be doing a quarterly review on your Vault anyway, just to make sure because this is your IP. This stuff is important. We put it in Vault for a reason, because we want it safe, sound, and protected. And we want to make sure-- just like we take our pets to the vet, we want to make sure they're happy and healthy.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: That's right.

ALLEN GAGER: A lot of words here, but if you've looked at moving, changing your Vault, it can seem a little-- seem a little scary. And I'm going to tell you, I am a diehard file-centric Vault fellow. I've always had a file-centric Vault. It wasn't until I started to love items when I got in my role at Autodesk and started really understanding the connectivity.

So I've been there. I've gone through it. I understand. I'm not going to say I'm in your shoes, but I understand how you're feeling. And the good news is it's not that bad.

First thing we got to do-- you might not even have items enabled in your Vault. So if you just migrated from Vault Workgroup into Vault Professional, it's likely that the item environment wasn't turned on. We do not have it in Basic or Workgroup. It's only in Pro.

This is an administrator function. We go in, and we turn on items, and we also can turn on change orders. So these are two workflows and environments that just simply need to be turned on. Kim, you want to take a shot at that today, first historical?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Yeah, so it's like I said, we need to work on what's in there today, what's making you money today and tomorrow, and how much of that old file-centric stuff do you actually use, and is it necessary? Or can we just draw a line in the sand and say, these are the 12 projects that I'm working on, and I'm going to make all those items on that, and I'm going to move forward?

And as I touch that old stuff, there's an SOP in place where I can put those into items when necessary. We can, of course, do all of it at once. With that becomes risk. But we would always recommend that you work on just what you need today and tomorrow and then backhand on those with some operating procedures that make it easy to move forward as you touch that stuff.

ALLEN GAGER: And I know we've got a slide or two kind of later in the deck. We're actually coming towards the end of the deck. But from a reseller perspective in those folks, such as yourselves, that have done, again, tons and tons of these, I'm assuming-- do you guys have any tools available to help with maybe doing some of this stuff?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: We do. I think we talk about that in a little bit. We have some-- PowerShell scripting is very powerful. I guess that was two words of power but in the same sentence. But it is very powerful with the Vault API.

And there's been multiple times that, especially on a new Vault where we're coming-- and we'll talk about that in my class later in the week. But you load all these data from the network drive, and obviously, there's no items, but we want to start an item-centric Vault.

So we have to run some stuff to create those items off of that. And we have some scripts and some tools that will automate that for us. Anytime you say the word "automate" and "data," you got to be very careful. There's that 80-20 rule, and there's still going to be some cleanup even if we automate that for you.

ALLEN GAGER: OK. So we just talked about it a little bit, understanding the change. We're going to have some more-- it's going to be a little different work. I've got files now that I've got to assign items in that.

We mentioned earlier that a file-centric Vault, the focus is on the files. But now we're kind of shifting our focus over to items. And kind of where that led me when I went through that process when I was in industry, I'm like, wait, what? But what about my files?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: They're still there, right? We've got to make sure that-- and they're still important. Yeah.

ALLEN GAGER: Yeah. I care about the file revision. The shop cares about the file revisions because that's what they're building it to. So understand that everything that you know and love about files and the importance of them, that doesn't go away.

We're going to add a layer. We're going to add that container, that vehicle, to transfer that information into the other systems that care about it. So the people that love their file-centric Vault, it's OK. We're not going to move that cheese. It's still part of your workflow. It still has every bit of importance. We're just adding an extra set of tools so that the rest of your business enterprise can leverage and take advantage.

So that kind of goes back to the next step. And, Kim, I'm going to hand this over to you just kind of from a configuration perspective.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: Sure. So we're going to have to configure, as he showed you in the slide, we're going have to enable the items, and then we're going to have to pick the files that we want to create items from or have to create some manual items.

We need to figure out who the customer is of this data-- I've said that multiple times-- Who needs this information, who's part of this process. We'll diagram all that out to make sure that we get the lifecycles and the process of the BOM, which takes on a whole life of its own, and manage all that for you.

We'll line it all out, Visio it out, whiteboard it out. We do all those things to make sure that it's configured properly and that all the stakeholders get out of the Vault what they need.

ALLEN GAGER: That's great, and I think it actually flows right into the next-- again, a couple just talking points. You talked about the definition. Let's talk a little bit-- tell me a little bit about the complexity. What are some things that our viewers, attendees need to think about when we start talking about complexity, compatibility, performance, and, of course, more importantly, training?

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: So we'll start with the easy one, the training. The training is pretty simple. There's a lot of resellers that can do the training and there's tons of stuff about items out in the AU website from years past. There's some good ones even back from 2015 and 2016 I wouldn't hesitate to send you to look at.

ALLEN GAGER: We'll put those in the handout, I think, because those are some great resources.

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: There's some great resources out there. Items don't have to be complex. But what you have to know is, what information are you taking from your CAD BOM to start that? What are you mapping? What's that key? Is it a part number? Is it a file name? What is that mapping vehicle that we're doing?

And then who's king of that item data? Is it your ERP system, and we've got to go assign that item there first and then assign it back? Not my favorite way to do it, but it can be done.

Or is the CAD BOM-- is the CAD really king? Is it really the start of everything and we're going to push everything in that direction? That's my favorite way to do it. It's usually how things are designed.

But it doesn't have to be that complex. Once it's defined and you figure out who's king and what data you need, then the flow becomes pretty easy. The performance, it's really good.

So once you get your BOM in your system, it's a SQL database. And SQL can handle all that data. So the performance is really good.

So once we transfer all that, and we make a change to our CAD file, which updates our item, then it's back in SQL. It's just 1's and 0's, and the performance is really, really good at that point.

ALLEN GAGER: So a question on the performance-- so thinking about that, so I have my Vault that I've been running for years. We did a health check. It's happy and healthy.

I got a million and a half files in there, and now I'm going to add a bunch of items. Is there anything I need to consider, maybe, from my hardware perspective, my tuning perspective? It feels to me like I'm adding more data to my Vault. So--

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: You are adding more data to your Vault. But the fun thing is you could take a file-centric Vault-- and this is one of those little-known geeky things. I'm going to geek out with you for just a second here.

You can take a file-centric Vault with a million files in it, and the SQL database is actually quite small. It's actually quite small because all the metadata, it's very little. It's very minimal, right?

Items create a whole different table-centric, and it's linked to them. And so once we start adding items, your database will grow. We need to make sure if you're going to go items, you should plan on a full license of SQL and not use SQL Express. You can use SQL Express in your sandbox if you want to save some money, but you should plan on a full license of SQL.

But it is really interesting to see how small the database can be with this huge file-centric Vault. And then we're just going to add more tables, which are quite small in the size of the data in there. So I think you just got to be sure that you've tuned your SQL correctly and that we're using a full license because there is limits on SQL Express that comes in the box with Vault.

ALLEN GAGER: And that's great to know. I was thinking it would add a little more, but it's good to know that it's not a heavy load. Compatibility perspective-- I know Autodesk made some changes a few years ago. So if I've got an older Vault that maybe hasn't been migrated to a more recent--

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: If you have a Vault that old, you need to contact your [? resellers, ?] and let's get you up to date because you're missing out on so many great new features. But if you're back in the 2015 world, which I hope you're not, 2016, there was a pretty big schema change on the database around items. So you can't skip that one.

As you know, when you upgrade your Vault, you can skip every other year. There are certain ones you shouldn't skip. '16 and '19 are one of those. You got to watch on those compatibility issues on those schemas. It's pretty well documented. Your reseller should know those things for you. But be sure you don't skip '16 and '19. That's my pro tip of the day.

ALLEN GAGER: OK, that's a great pro tip because, as we know, we have some customers that maybe were contractually obligated to supply data in those versions that may--

KIMBERLEY HENDRIX: That's right.

ALLEN GAGER: So that's good. OK. So now we're talking about the rules and stuff. And we have "consistency is most important" in bold here.

A couple great points along this slide, I think-- so, Kim, you're on a roll if you want to just take these and run with them.