Hello,
First of all, I have a feeling that this ENOVIA V6 forum is under wrong header - I guess this should be under that new Product requirement thing, where our friend Dave is very active?
Second thing; my intention is really not to say negative things about V6, just to speak very directly about current capability and what is needed there to get really great solution in use. (don't mix me to CATIA haters club!)
Now to the actual topic; I want to open a discussion about what should be Enovia/CATIA V6 "Out of box" functionality. I'll start with one post that tries to explain why (on my opinion) 'Out of box' is always better than 'gee, it was fun to customize our own system last time when we migrated to V5, let's do it again!'
So first WHY we should have a really usable solution after standard installation, without major tweaking: I have tested V6R2009X, R2010 and R2010X and none of them is supporting even very basic engineering scenarios as out of box solution, I totally want to change this. (now, please don't underestimate me by assuming that I want to have solution that supports my company's processes and I am disappointed that solution doesn't... I seriously mean that it doesn't support ANY company's engineering processes out of the box - you'll see what I mean when I get to the details on this)
So here are reasons, details on what needs to be changed will come as replies: (I am writing this from a big company viewpoint, other points of view are of course welcome)
1) New system evaluation and testing. It's much easier to enter evaluation phase if solution is tuned for engineering purposes and is somehow fitting to processes where it needs to be tested than entering an evaluation period through long lasting customization task.
2) Suppliers; today's engineering processes are all about networking, many small supplier companies have today for example a non-customized SmarTeam in use (which is as out of box totally a horrid solution, managing uniqueness of files in vaults... urgh) because they don't want to invest to system modifications. This is not going to change with V6. => to get effective suppliers only solution is to have easily available out of box solution.
3) Problem fixing; DS has never had an intention to fix problems as main stream against customized databases. Only against their own out of box database. Problem reproducing and fix evaluation should and could happen most effectively in out of box database and environment.
4) Overall process and integrated system functionality. (this is going to be a bit hard to explain; I'll get back to this with example of part types and CATIA settings on one of the replies) With this I mean that certain typically customized capabilities (say part classification) actually are so common for many processes that certain Standard functionalities (like if publishing is allowed) should be connected to these with system rules.
5)...and of course initial implementation speed & cost. Implementation project doesn't HAVE to be several years lasting major investment with a feeling of great achievements when system is finally up & running, but it could be just a short evaluation and start using a great system kind of a feeling.
6) Then the final reason, that merely justifies why this is possible, not why it should happen. The fact that every company has unique processes and that's why they need unique solutions is a myth. (fed by consulting companies that make living from this myth) It just is not true, in engineering and design domain processes are Surprisingly similar from company to company. There is a degree of similarity that can be found from engineering processes through out the world. Believe me on this; seeing those similarities in many companies is really eye opening experience. I hope that we can prove this together by listing those similarities (in functional level, not in process level) one by one and realizing that we all have same needs for engineering system. Names and wordings change company by company, but real topics remain the same.
Next post will be about first requirements on this area.
First of all, I have a feeling that this ENOVIA V6 forum is under wrong header - I guess this should be under that new Product requirement thing, where our friend Dave is very active?
Second thing; my intention is really not to say negative things about V6, just to speak very directly about current capability and what is needed there to get really great solution in use. (don't mix me to CATIA haters club!)
Now to the actual topic; I want to open a discussion about what should be Enovia/CATIA V6 "Out of box" functionality. I'll start with one post that tries to explain why (on my opinion) 'Out of box' is always better than 'gee, it was fun to customize our own system last time when we migrated to V5, let's do it again!'
So first WHY we should have a really usable solution after standard installation, without major tweaking: I have tested V6R2009X, R2010 and R2010X and none of them is supporting even very basic engineering scenarios as out of box solution, I totally want to change this. (now, please don't underestimate me by assuming that I want to have solution that supports my company's processes and I am disappointed that solution doesn't... I seriously mean that it doesn't support ANY company's engineering processes out of the box - you'll see what I mean when I get to the details on this)
So here are reasons, details on what needs to be changed will come as replies: (I am writing this from a big company viewpoint, other points of view are of course welcome)
1) New system evaluation and testing. It's much easier to enter evaluation phase if solution is tuned for engineering purposes and is somehow fitting to processes where it needs to be tested than entering an evaluation period through long lasting customization task.
2) Suppliers; today's engineering processes are all about networking, many small supplier companies have today for example a non-customized SmarTeam in use (which is as out of box totally a horrid solution, managing uniqueness of files in vaults... urgh) because they don't want to invest to system modifications. This is not going to change with V6. => to get effective suppliers only solution is to have easily available out of box solution.
3) Problem fixing; DS has never had an intention to fix problems as main stream against customized databases. Only against their own out of box database. Problem reproducing and fix evaluation should and could happen most effectively in out of box database and environment.
4) Overall process and integrated system functionality. (this is going to be a bit hard to explain; I'll get back to this with example of part types and CATIA settings on one of the replies) With this I mean that certain typically customized capabilities (say part classification) actually are so common for many processes that certain Standard functionalities (like if publishing is allowed) should be connected to these with system rules.
5)...and of course initial implementation speed & cost. Implementation project doesn't HAVE to be several years lasting major investment with a feeling of great achievements when system is finally up & running, but it could be just a short evaluation and start using a great system kind of a feeling.
6) Then the final reason, that merely justifies why this is possible, not why it should happen. The fact that every company has unique processes and that's why they need unique solutions is a myth. (fed by consulting companies that make living from this myth) It just is not true, in engineering and design domain processes are Surprisingly similar from company to company. There is a degree of similarity that can be found from engineering processes through out the world. Believe me on this; seeing those similarities in many companies is really eye opening experience. I hope that we can prove this together by listing those similarities (in functional level, not in process level) one by one and realizing that we all have same needs for engineering system. Names and wordings change company by company, but real topics remain the same.
Next post will be about first requirements on this area.