Digital Engineering – August 2019

DigitalEngineering247.com /// August 2019 DE| Technology for Optimal Engineering Design (^25)
receive notifications; they can also tag posts, make comments,
instant message and invoke video calls and voice chats much
like they do with the social platforms used in their personal
lives, Kamat says.
At Autodesk, the company is focused on providing its
customers with collaboration options. Charlie Candy, global
business strategy leader for Design & Manufacturing at Au-
todesk, says the company equips all of its subscribers with live
collaboration tools that enable real-time, visual and interac-
tive feedback to allow them to capture light discussion in
context, rather than relying on emails and meetings.
“We want to be flexible to our customer’s preferences, so
we’ve made it possible to integrate these platforms with Fu-
sion Lifecycle, using open APIs and Autodesk Forge,” Candy
says. “For example, a customer could use a Slack integration
with Fusion Lifecycle to respond to triggers or updates to re-
cords. This provides an event ‘watch’ that can post messages
to social media or Slack (or Trello or Asana) for instance.”
Arena Solutions is making it a priority to build its own
social collaboration capabilities within its controlled PLM
environment. The reason, says Scott Reedy, senior director
of marketing, is if you push product development-related
data or conversations into a tool like Slack, it requires
people to be users of both systems to get the full depth and
context for the data.
In contrast, Reedy says Arena Scribe, as part of the PLM
foundation, offers one place to manage product development
and quality processes collaboratively. Users can engage in
discussions through a chat interface, and those interfaces are
directly connected to the product record. In addition, there
are controls to limit what discussions and comments suppli-
ers may access.
“You need to be able to collaborate with internal teams
and supply chain partners, but the key is how do you do
it in a secure manner and not like email, which is discon-
nected,” Reedy says. “If the collaboration tool is not directly
connected to PLM, it makes it hard for everyone to know if
they’re working with the latest information.”
Aras, which has offered social collaboration capabilities
for the Innovator PLM platform since 2014, has continued to
round out these functions as part of its HTML5-based Visual
Collaboration feature set. Visual Collaboration allows team
members to mark up and share 3D models, office documents
and schematics as part of a discussion thread that is visible
to users in an Innovator side panel displayed in context with
a document or BOM, explains Rob McAveney, Aras CTO.
Moving forward, McAveney says the tool is being expanded
with support for more live sessions, collaboration during
authoring and presence indicators for live chat so team mem-
bers can interact in real time.
In addition to context, Visual Collaboration promotes
social interaction with the requisite enterprise security and
controls, which McAveney says is critical so engineers don’t
engage in public discussions about proprietary design intel-
lectual property or reveal competitive information.
“There is a need for informal collaboration—conversa-
tions not about what you had for lunch, but about the param-
eters of the thing you are designing,” says McAveney. “That’s
why we believe it’s important to build social into PLM, not
because it’s cool, but because the information is sensitive and
you want to keep control over it.” DE
Beth Stackpole is a contributing editor to DE. You can reach her
at [email protected].
Arena Scribe’s social sharing capabilities ensure casual discussions are not disconnected from the product
record. Image courtesy of Arena Solutions.
INFO ➜Aras: Aras.com
➜Arena Solutions: ArenaSolutions.com
➜Cambashi: Cambashi.com
➜Dassault Systèmes: 3ds.com
➜MBX Systems: MBX.com
➜Siemens PLM Software: Siemens.com/PLM
For more information on this topic, visit DigitalEngineering247.com.
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