ian

Arhus

The final stop on my tour of Denmark was Arhus.

After travelling from Odense (pronounced oo-unce, for my own future reference) we arrived in Arhus around 7pm.

Just enough time for a quick shower and off to lunch with the Solid Design House team. Now I have spent a considerable amount of time in Germany, and the Germans do like their meat. But tonight I had placed in front of me a joint of beef that would have lasted me and my family a whole week back home. Only this one was all for me. As beautiful as it was I don't think I'll be eating beef for a while.

The setting for today's seminar was another Cinemax movie theatre. Again DriveWorksXpress received a great response; there is a clear need for easy to use design automation within industry.

With over 200 people attending today's seminar the guys from Solid Desgin House thought at least 50% would benefit from design automation.

My job sends me to some very interesting places, but I usually only see the inside of airports and hotel rooms. This week has been quite an adventure, travelling the length of Denmark by car, over the new bridge that connects Sealand to Jutland and then back to where we started by the high speed ferry. I always enjoy seeing the different architecture and experiencing the culture of the places I visit, this week has been a joy to fit so much in a short space of time.

I'm sure I'll be back here soon.

Arhus cathedral

Odense

Another impressive turnout, around 150 people attended today's seminar.

It was quite a different venue to the cinema of yesterday, but still a very nice location.

I tweaked my presentation to show just how easy it is to build a rule in DriveWorksXpress and DriveWorks, without the need for any programming skills what-so-ever.

It certainly got the point across.

One customer had spent the last year working with another reseller on a custom solution.... he has not got anywhere, nothing at all to show for 1 years work, all that consultancy money spent! He saw my presentation and summarized he could have his designs automated within a month with the added bonus that he would own his data and not some consultant!

On to Aarhus now. More tomorrow

The venue at Odense

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen

Day 1 of Solid Design House's SolidWorks 2008 rollout event was quite breathtaking.

Copenhagen is beautiful, the venue was a great choice for a seminar, and the turnout was quite astounding.

The seminar was held in screen 8 of the Cinemax movie theatre just on the outskirts of the city. It was quite an experience being at the front of an audience of up to 200 people with the back drop of the big screen behind me.

There was only a small issue in that one customer turned up slightly late and sat down in screen 7 for the first half of the what's new in SolidWorks 2008 presentation, still he did get to watch Rush Hour 3. I am not sure if you could confuse Jackie Chan with Mr. Torimoto (remember the SolidWorks origami video?) so I don't know where this customer went wrong.

Anyway it did bring a tear to my eye watching our baby, DriveWorksXpress, looking all grown up inside SolidWorks 2008. And being presented so proffessionally by a technician from Solid Design House. Our development team have done an amazing job in rounding off the sharp edges of DriveWorksXpress, and the useability teams from SolidWorks and DriveWorks have just put that sparkle of magic into the look and feel.

I heard several people mention that DriveWorksXpress being in SolidWorks 2008 is going to save them lots and lots of design time, which is what we are all about.

DriveWorksXpress on the 'silver screen'

I get let out also, you know!

Hot on the heels of Glens tour of Australia and New Zealand I am about to embark on a tour of Denmark.

Solid Design House have invited DriveWorks to their SolidWorks 2008 rollout across 3 locations in Denmark. Latest figures show nearly 600 people registered to attend over the course of the 3 days... that is an incredible turnout.

I am thoroughly looking forward to this event, although it will be a little unusual watching DriveWorksXpress being demonstrated by somebody else. Still, this is an indication of the barriers DriveWorks has broken down to bring design automation to every engineer's desktop.

Help!

You will note a 5 month gap since my last post. I apologize but there are reasons...

1. The main reason is that my wife decided that I should be spending my evenings re-decorating the house rather than enjoying my work!!
2. I completely hand made a cabin bed for my daughter's bedroom.
3. We wanted a complete overhaul of the main resource aid available to our customers, namely the help file that ships with each product.

Just as we take quality and stability of product seriously we take technical communication seriously. Sharing our knowledge can only be good for all, as it: -

• Reduces the support burden on our resellers and ourselves
• Contributes to the success of the customer

There are many, many ways we can share technical information. Steps are being taken to explore each one and hopefully I will be making you aware about these in the not too distant future. But for now I wanted to enlighten you of the work under taken by our technical team for the compiled help file that is being shipped with SP2.

We feel after the excellent training programmes offered by our VAR's the help file is the next most important method for users to understand what can be done and how to do it. I personally feel more comfortable finding out how to achieve something by learning myself rather than have someone do it for me.

This is why we committed a large amount of time, completely focussed on re-structuring and adding content to the compiled help file for the latest service release.

Producing a technical document can be an absorbing task. Producing a technical document that can also serve as a compiled help file adds another level of complexity to the cause.

In the long distant past we held data in one format for the help file, another format for a knowledge base, another format again for training courses, and also utilized .doc, .xls, .ppt formats for many other types of documents we regularly produce. We knew to maintain a healthy technical resource we needed to standardize on one format. The format had to be Microsoft Word – it is an essential tool in everything we do. But compiled help files required the data to be presented in HTML format.

Luckily we found and invested in a program that scans a Word document creates all the html files, creates a TOC, Index and keyword list and compiles it all together as the .chm file we need, all at the touch of a button.

So our attention then turned to learning how to use Word more effectively. We learned how to effectively use formatting and styles, how to index items, how to mark items for keywords, how to cross reference topics, etc.

Next we focussed on content. We wanted a good mix of data in the help file that covered the straightforward functionality (just in case it had been forgotten), right through to the more involved 'enterprise type' areas. Content was acquired from our existing knowledge base, reseller and customer feedback, existing training documentation, support requests and our own knowledge of working with SolidWorks and DriveWorks.

Prior to SP2 we had a contents structure that had a beginner section, an intermediate section and an advanced section. This proved difficult to place topics, we take pride in making DriveWorks 'easy to use' so having an advanced section seemed to contradict this. The more understandable structure, for the contents to take, was one representative of the logical To Do list available in the product. This obvious change makes finding the topic help is needed for simple.

And so with the release of SP2 we hope the all new help file will give you the information you require when you need it. I hope it's not too long before I can bring you news on additional resources that will be at your disposal.

The 'hand made' cabin bed

…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.