I applaud anyone currently considering how the Internet of Things (IoT) can transform their company and their approach to competition. This is what every industrial and consumer product company should be doing right now. While helping companies through the early stages of developing IoT strategies we’ve recognized a common challenge. Teams can get lost in the excitement of enabling their first “thing” and lose focus on their long-term vision and the value they can extract from streaming data. We get it! The IoT is exciting. That is why we always coach our clients to select an IoT platform (software) that allows them to quickly and easily develop applications that present valuable, digestible information to employees and customers – whether or not a role or data stream was part of the initial strategy.
This week provided me with a front row seat to unexpected value from streaming data. While working on an IoT proof of concept for a client, my team was able to refine a data stream and deliver a new application to an audience that was not part of the initial scope of the project. The only reason we were able to create this new application without charging an additional fee is because we selected ThingWorx, a solution by PTC as the application/mashup development tool. Thingworx helps teams create new applications in minutes.

I try to spend the majority of my time working on IoT strategies and how they can transform companies and competition. My background in engineering and software development provides me with a unique view into the time spent making things smart — providing sensor networks, communication layers, and ultimately enabling heretofore unseen analytics in real-time on remote products. The project the Connect Services team and I were working on this week involved developing mashups, which stemmed from earlier strategy work and team alignment. Mashups are the collection and presentation of data from smart things and systems enabling real-time business awareness and decision-making. For this project, we had already developed storyboards for the apps that would enable core product and service differentiation. Everyone was on board and excited.

Once the proof of concept device was wired and streaming data, we saw a whole new role that would benefit from the data that was streaming. Previously, the engineers would have been left hanging and the data would have been left alone and isolated. This is because developing an extra application for ancillary roles would have taken the project well off track. Leveraging ThingWorx as our application development environment, we were able to build a concept from scratch in literally seconds. What’s really cool is that it didn’t take any code at all either, just drag, drop, save, and we were in business. The concept made sense and in literally a couple of hours (not days or weeks) we had created an entirely new app and use case for the data. We were able to refine the data in real-time and create a whole new monitoring experience. Again, this was done without coding, just simply drag and drop.

So, here’s my recommendation — make sure your IoT platform supports your IoT strategy. And what’s more, be sure the platform you select is a tool that is flexible, fast, and fun — like ThingWorx. You will likely find more and more ways to consume, refine, and benefit from the data your connected products and enterprise produce just because it’s easy to do. And this, after all, is what your IoT platform should do — it should enable your existing business initiatives and accelerate your business initiatives.

EAC Connect Services is here to help you develop your IoT strategy, build and connect your proof of concept, and select the appropriate platform. Let us be your partner in the ever-changing world of the IoT. Please let us know if we can help you transform your business and help you beat your competition.

Enterprise systems require administration and management that can be time-consuming and foreign territory for many companies. This is why we created the EAC Alliance Program.

The Alliance Program provides PTC Windchill system administration and support services.

Our team of expert technicians improve system performance, optimize server and license configurations, and maintain a stable PLM environment for your organization. The Alliance Program is transforming the way companies service their Windchill and Intralink PLM & PDM systems.

Alliance Program customers save an average of 50% over other options for dedicated administration and support.

Our team of certified and experienced technicians proactively monitors system events and diagnostics that typically go unnoticed.

Their attention to detail and deep understanding of the technology allows them to increase system stability and reduce downtime by up to 95%.

At EAC, we want to partner with you to you create a better, more productive workspace. The Alliance Program is helping customers increase user satisfaction and ensure a return on their Windchill investment. We accomplish this by providing:

• On-going technical support
• Business process consulting
• System Monitoring
• System Maintenance
• Upgrade Planning
• Implementation
• Performance Tuning
• Windchill Server Optimization
• Monthly Mentoring for Admins & Users
• Discounts on all EAC Training Services

Does the phrase “Formal Change Control” lead to scary thoughts like “We don’t have the time to set that up,” or “We don’t know how to do it or where to start?” If this sounds like you, likely your organization is spending more time dealing with the downstream and long term repeated issues than if they took the time to outline a change control process.

While every company will vary, there are three basic phases of creating a formal change control process. Find out how to implement a formal change control process in these three phases.

1. Issue or Problem Reporting
2. Change Request or Approval Process
3. Change Notice or Execution

Phase 1: Reporting & Logging Issues

• Provide an efficient way for anyone in the organization to report and log issues.
• Store issues in an Issue Queue that will resolved it in one of three ways:
  • Take no action
  • Put the issue on hold
  • Request a formal change

Phase 2: Formal Change Request

• The Formal Change Request is the second stage of review that can be handled in one of three ways:
  • Rejection
  • Request more information
  • Approved for further action, either fast track or Full Formal Change

• If the change is approved for further action, it typically is reviewed by a board that will do one of the following:
  • Reject the change request
  • Proceed to the change notice

Phase 3: The Change Notice

• At this point the change request can no longer be rejected, it must be addressed and acted upon.
• This phase can be defined as Static or Dynamic:
  • If it is a Static process, the same departments and teams will be notified and responsible for executing the change
  • If it is a Dynamic, a new process is developed specifically for each change

• When the plan is fully defined, typically a change implementation board review occurs.

Formal Change Control processes are simple, the added control of these processes alone could save your organization money in the long run. The possibility of increased productivity and reduced quality issues will far outweigh the initial time and resources required to get a change control process implemented.

EAC Product Development Solutions (EAC), a leading provider of product development technology and services, is pleased to announce a partnership with Formlabs. This partnership allows EAC to bring professional quality SLA 3D printers and materials to commercial product development and education customers.

May 5, 2016 — EAC Product Development Solutions (EAC) brings desktop SLA 3D printing to commercial customers through strategic partnership with Formlabs.

EAC has signed a partnership agreement to become a North American Channel Reseller for Formlabs. They will offer commercial, discrete manufacturing, and education customers the full line of Formlabs products. This partnership addresses increasing market demand for accessible additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping solutions. The Form 2 3D Printer will allow EAC’s customers to insert high-quality stereolithography (SLA) prototyping into their engineering and design workflows, for a fraction of the cost of competing technologies. The ability to minimize turnaround times by keeping prototyping in house is critical. Especially today, when development costs are scrutinized and time-to-market is more important than ever.

“We use the Form 2 to bring additional value to our engineering services engagements. I’m excited to bring the technology directly to our customers and look forward to sharing the knowledge we’ve acquired. These printers should be on the desk of every engineer. They have the potential to dramatically shorten design cycles and increase innovation. It’s amazing what happens when you enable an engineer to get their hands on a design idea.” — Allen Caldwell, senior mechanical engineer at EAC Product Development Solutions

Thane Hathaway, President and CEO of EAC said: “I built this company with a mission; to transform the way companies design, manufacture, connect to, and service their products. Additive Manufacturing, or 3D Printing, is a transformative technology that’s changing the way organizations approach product development. The Formlabs printers and materials offer professional quality 3D printing at an incredible price point. I look forward to this partnership and helping our education and commercial customers embrace this technology.”

“With decades of experience, EAC pairs deep product development expertise with a strong background in technical design. This distinct expertise will accelerate Formlabs’ efforts in bringing accessible, powerful desktop 3D printing to the millions of professional engineers and designers worldwide.” – Luke Winston, head of sales and customer success at Formlabs.

About EAC:
EAC Product Development Solutions transforms the way companies design, manufacture, connect to, and service their products. For more than 20 years they have provided the services and technologies needed to innovate, optimize, and win in the complex and competitive world of product development.

About Formlabs:
Formlabs designs and manufactures powerful and accessible 3D printing systems for engineers, designers, and artists. Their flagship product, the Form 2 3D Printer, uses stereolithography (SLA) to create high-resolution physical objects from digital designs. The company was founded in 2012 by a team of engineers and designers from the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms. With its powerful, intuitive, and affordable machines, Formlabs is establishing a new benchmark in professional desktop 3D printing. Formlabs also develops its own suite of high-performance materials for 3D printing, as well as best-in-class 3D-printing software.

Product development can be time consuming, difficult to manage, and slow to get up and running. Luckily, EAC Engineering Services is here to help transform the way you design your products. We offer a number of services to help you reduce time-to-market and improve project management to complete more projects. We can help with everything from customized mentoring to acting as your entire engineering team.

Milestone AV Technologies was in a position in which engineering resources were being fully utilized on active projects but they needed to make progress on a project that had been prototyped but stalled for nearly a year. Their solution? Find a trusted partner to deliver a thorough and mature design.

Milestone AV Technologies selected EAC as their trusted partner to deliver engineering and design services as well as manage the project.

Mike Ardito, Director of Product Development at Milestone AV Technologies said that in the little amount of time EAC Design Engineers worked on the project, they advanced it significantly. The level of maturity in the design exceeded his expectations.

“The first thing that was really evident when we started [working together] was that [EAC’s Design Engineer] was being very diligent from an engineering standpoint. We set up weekly meetings to check in, to give guidance, see what he was doing, and answer questions. It was clear that he was doing a lot of upfront work that would inform the design later. The engineering rigor and the quality of engineering work and the technical work, I got the impression was very good and the diligence was very high.”

Milestone needed to maintain critical client relationships by completing the project on-time and within budget. Leveraging the partnership with EAC allowed them to do exactly that. The project was completed on-time and within 10% of budget.

Like many companies, Milestone prefers to keep project work internal. However, if the opportunity presented itself, Ardito said he would have no issues coming back to EAC to based on his first experience with EAC.

Ardito explained that they look to outside design firms because they don’t have the internal resources available to manage the project but still want to move forward with it. He said “the worst possible case would be to go to somebody to do the external work and then have to spend a lot on internal resources managing that work.” He also explained that working with EAC, he was comfortable because he knew the project was in good hands and he would receive a quality output.

It was the first time Milestone AV Technologies reached out to another design firm in over a year. Ardito said, “The most valuable part of partnering with EAC goes back to having faith very early on that the technical rigor and detail was being addressed. I was assured that the EAC team was going to do the diligence necessary to create a good design.”

Milestone AV Technologies was able to complete a critical project 40% (8 months) faster by leveraging EAC’s Engineering Services group. Ardito explained that realistically, due to their workload they wouldn’t have been able to work on this project until the first quarter of 2016; EAC was able to deliver this project to them in October of 2015.

Ardito’s final comment was, “The level of service [EAC] provided, in terms of being available, the amount of attention EAC gave to the project before, during, and after was very good. It wasn’t the kind of thing where ‘we won this contract so we’re going to slap it out and not really follow up and make sure the customer is happy.’ It was just the right way to do business.”

When is PDSA season?
We all know when it’s cold and flu season and what precautions to take to get back to health or at least dial down the symptoms. However, do we recognize when it’s time to conduct a Product Development System Assessment (PDSA) to get our organization back to health?

To analogize a real life situation, if someone is sick and goes to the doctor, the doctor would want to treat the immediate sickness and then propose a physical to determine what else is going on within the patient’s body. The doctor then sets a diagnosis for continuous improvement of health. A PDSA lends itself to something close to this from a product development standpoint.

An organization must first acknowledge a problem from a department stakeholder (i.e: Vice President, Director, Manager). They must obtain an understanding of how this problem effects downstream departments and create a sense of urgency that this one problem, is only one problem, and more problems are likely to be a major inhibitor to reaching goals.

Sure, organizations can operate with these inefficiencies and still make products, but we want them to know that they could make even more products or run more projects by taking part in a PDSA, which is when we come in to align an organization’s goals and measure achievement recognition through a secure and obtainable continuous improvement plan. PDSA’s are our way of measuring an organizations pain in their processes and providing a long-term solution to provide continuous improvement and maintain a healthy organization.

PDSA’s are the only way for EAC to truly understand the heartbeat of a company and the only way a customer or prospect can become a partner. Their goals become our goals for that organization.

Why would you want a PDSA?

PDSA’s are valuable for two reasons. First we, EAC, help clients to see their product development operation as a system which is a critical first step in making the operation better (i.e. more systematic).  Secondly, we provide, as the output of the assessment, a set of high leverage improvement initiatives that will directly lead to increased productivity of their product development system.

Organizations may know something is not right with their product development operation – maybe for instance due to the number of recurring fires they fight – but they don’t know where to focus their improvement initiatives until they learn to see their operation as a system as opposed to a process.

The PDSA aligns a company’s business strategies and objectives to product development initiatives to determine areas of improvement. This is so valuable to be able to motivate a company or the internal champion to see how an improvement to a product development system would be tied to or contribute to a portion of the company’s objectives.

For example, an organizations objective or value opportunity is to reduce product development cost. Then we would streamline the product development system by making sure the people, process, and technology within a product development process are all working together without disrupting another part of the product development process thus taking waste out of the system enables reduction in cost.

During a PDSA, we engage with multifunctional groups within a company to extract process information and where waste is.  Over and above that, a continuous improvement strategy will be set in place for the company to achieve the desired state or desired maturity level. Without an investment in continuous improvement, a one-time fix to a process or system will not sustain in the long term.

What’s so great about PDSA’s?

PDSA’s are learning events and EAC consultants learn something new with every PDSA because of the uniqueness of each client we work with. Beyond spreading our understanding of seeing operations as systems, it is exciting to be able to learn the details of the client’s operations and then provide critical improvement information.

The ability to tell an internal champion or the economic buyer that their organization is “leaking oil” or specifically being able to quantify to them the dollars being wasted, and that we, EAC are here to help reduce that and get them in a better state excites me. The ability to whiteboard the organizations processes and ask them why they would perform a certain task in that fashion. The ability to ask the tough questions, like “what is the biggest headache or challenge they have right now?” and “what is working well for you?” The ability to help the champion to present to their executive board is what is rewarding in the end.

We live and breathe to make a difference for our customers. PDSA’s are a mental marathon that test every part of a person’s attention to detail, savvy, note taking, and overall listening abilities. The challenge is what we get revved up for. We never know what we are going to find.