A room with many views: PLM Summit hosted virtual collaboration space
Malcolm Wheatley, senior contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/23/2008 8:09:00 AM
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Michael Grieves is widely recognized as a product life-cycle management (PLM) guru. He has held senior executive positions at several Fortune 1000 companies, and is a cofounder of institutes devoted to advancing the practice of PLM at two separate universities. So when Grieves outlined his vision for “virtual collaboration rooms”–i.e., cyberspace locations for specialists from across an enterprise to gather and share product development ideas—a lot of people in the industry paid attention.
But Steve Smith went a step further. Smith, a principal consultant with telecommunications provider BT Global Services North America, set out to make Grieves’ vision a reality.
When Smith first heard of the virtual collaboration room concept, “I thought: ‘We can do that today,’ ” he says. "We have the products and technologies—we just haven’t assembled them in that particular way.”
Given the green light by BT to build such a virtual room, Smith showed it to Grieves, then analysts, then customers.
“Several customers bought it right away,” says Smith. Their names aren’t yet public, although this is expected to change, he adds. In the meantime, what he can say is that they include several of the largest global automotive OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers, as well as similar customers in vertical markets such as life sciences.
Smith also revealed his virtual collaboration room at the European PLM Summit, hosted in late June by the World Trade Group in Toulouse, France. During a demonstration, Smith said the virtual collaboration room can be deployed on top of any PLM vendor’s technology stack, without writing any new software code.
Smith says of the companies he has spoken to about the room, they already have many of the pieces of the technology it comprises as part of their existing PLM, product data management, CAD, and desktop productivity solutions; what is required now is getting those solutions to interoperate. And that, Smith says, just happens to be BT’s area of expertise.
The BT solution combines Microsoft SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Windows Server, Active Directory, and Office Communications Server into a single platform integrated with a business’ own telephony infrastructure to create an environment in which users can collaborate on shared PLM, CAD, ERP, and other files, using "click-to-call, find-me-follow-me" video conferencing and other next-generation communications tools, including wikis and blogs.
Says Smith, “Everything in the room is contextual to the project in question. Click on a component, see an issue; click again to talk to the relevant person—whether they are a fellow employee, a customer, or a supplier—and instead of phoning and getting voicemail, you’re automatically routed to instant messaging, where you can negotiate a voice connection. ... All without leaving the virtual collaboration room’s desktop on your screen.”
Also powerful is the way that digital design data is made available throughout the virtual collaboration room, without requiring additional seat licenses for the native application in which it was created.
“People aren’t writing to the engineering data, but reading it—searching it, and making it connectable to other applications,” says Smith. “They’re telling us that they’re seeing information they’ve never seen before, and looking at it in new ways: taking this part number, and looking it up in that application, which they’ve never done before.”
