Collaboration||| DIGITAL THREAD
DigitalEngineering247.com /// August 2019 DE| Technology for Optimal Engineering Design (^23)
“We needed to compartmentalize communications in
a way that wasn’t just a series of disparate phone calls and
emails between person A and B, or person C and D,” says
Justin Formella, chief strategy officer for MBX. “There
were these long email strings that weren’t coordinated and
weren’t necessarily inclusive of all the people who had the
relevant information.”
MBX found the solution to its communications problem
with Slack, a cloud-based collaboration hub, which integrates
a range of social capabilities such as instant messaging, the
ability to share files, video chats and screen sharing. Slack,
along with similar offerings like Microsoft Teams, have be-
come popular enterprise collaboration hubs and are now
starting to find their way into software and more recently,
hardware engineering circles to help promote more informal
interactions among team members.
“Traditional PLM (product lifecycle management) is great
at putting together defined digital processes and change
management processes, but increasingly, engineering changes
are really enterprise changes,” notes Peter Thorn, CEO
of Cambashi, an analyst and consulting company focused
on engineering software and manufacturing. “It’s not just
engineers looking at the functions of the device, but it’s the
procurement people thinking about materials and suppliers
or manufacturing people considering manufacturing issues.
The social element creates a kind of oil that lubricates the
process. It’s a way people can be integrated in an easy and
direct process.”
Yet while social collaboration platforms like Slack help
advance the product design and development process, they
also have the potential to create another siloed informa-
tion source if not properly integrated or built directly into
the core product lifecycle management (PLM) foundation,
many experts contend. Ad hoc conversations or informal and
impromptu design sessions that take place in a Slack channel
without integration with PLM are disconnected from the
context of other product-related decisions and also run the
risk of being lost or left out of the official product record.
“If you’re doing ad hoc communication in a disconnected
environment, you are collaborating, but you’re not capturing
what you’re collaborating,” says Bill Lewis, director of mar-
keting for Teamcenter at Siemens PLM Software. “You don’t
get the benefits if it’s not connected to the PLM system.”
Project Communications Channel
At MBX, direct integration into a packaged PLM platform
isn’t a requirement, thus the company’s ability to turn to
Slack for their ad hoc communications needs. The company,
Social and Connected PLM
Platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are gaining traction, but some say
ad hoc exchanges must be part of the record for the digital thread.
As part of Aras Innovator’s Visual Collaboration
capabilities, MyDiscussions provides a feed of all
activity relevant to the user, including the context in
which it was written. Image courtesy of Aras.
BY BETH STACKPOLE
F
OR YEARS, EMAIL WAS THE DE FACTO, informal information exchange mechanism for the design team at
MBX Systems, a systems integrator providing bespoke computing hardware and software solutions for companies
across a host of industries. Sometimes the need was to quickly confer on a product design document or to clarify a
question about supplier pricing. In either case, the engineering team was hungry for a way to fire off quick messages
to multiple groups, both internally and to outside parties.
DE_0819_Social_PLM_Beth.indd 23 7/11/19 10:46 AM