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…Why DriveWorks?

My Why Automate blog is a very true story. I wanted to share it because it very effectively highlights the way DriveWorks can be implemented in an engineer-to-order business.

DriveWorks allows you to grow your implementation, start with an area of your business where the most significant gains can be achieved – the hose pipe. You will get results quick. You will start to get a return for the relatively small amount of investment. This could even be a sub-set of the product you sell the most of.

From there you can then easily scale things up; you will have implemented a good foundation on which you can add more of your product range and more of your product options – the irrigation system. This is where time savings really start to increase.

The most common fear of engineers, when they see DriveWorks, is for their jobs. I have yet to see a DriveWorks customer lay off engineers because of automating their design process. What I do see are engineers moving into a role they were trained to do. Rather than spend their day finding, then altering the closest template they find to the current order they are processing (then spend the night worrying if they actually did alter them correctly), they become designers again. Adding value back into the products they manufacture by being able to research new ideas - experiment with including all of God's botanical (mechanical) creations.

Then the time comes to experiment with the tools that come out of the DriveWorks 'box' to help with importing and exporting data to and from other company systems - integrate the rain water collection barrels into the irrigation system.

I often find companies who are contemplating automation think hard about the rain water collection barrels. Precious time is lost doing this, time that could have been used to move towards a hose pipe. And when they do think they have satisfied the need in their own minds, things change and nothing gets done – back to using the watering can.

Why Automate?

My Father loves his garden.

In the height of the summer months he spends 2 hours a night watering the various hanging baskets, planters, greenhouse cultivations, borders and grass.

His garden, although beautifully maintained, always stayed the same. He had the same hanging basket arrangements, same flowers in his planters and the same seeds and cuttings being cultivated.

As he approached retirement the trek from flower to faucet, to fill his watering can was becoming increasingly more difficult and time consuming.

So he installed an outside faucet and hose pipe. This removed the burden of carrying the watering can and also slightly reduced the time needed to irrigate the garden. He was happy.

I wasn't. You see my father's other love is to travel, and now he has retired he does this more frequently. This means after a long day at work, I spend some time with my kids and then I spend the rest of my short evenings hosing flowers. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the beauty of nature, but I don't yet appreciate all the effort required to maintain a nice looking garden.

So, I have recently helped my father to select and purchase an irrigation system. It took a few nights to fully install but from being a man who was happy with a hosepipe, my father is now ecstatic with his irrigation system. Furthermore it has a timer, so he can set as many different times and varying lengths for the irrigation to take place. I am happy to, when he goes away I just periodically check everything is doing what it should.

Now, having eliminated the pain of carrying a watering can and a considerable amount of time required to water, you might think my father's hobby has had the fun taken away from it. Wrong. It has injected a whole new concept of gardening for my father by allowing him to experiment with including all of God's botanical creations, of which I am told there are quite a lot. He now has the time to learn more, grow more variety, and plant different arrangements where previously he was happy with what he knew.

The next thing he wants to do is to integrate his rain water collection barrels into the irrigation system, just so he is environmentally 'green'.

Not my father's…but could be soon.