Not many people speak Welsh any more but the law says all road signs must be bilingual. The council sent off this sign to an agency for translation and got the answer back in an email. The sign was erected and in place for several weeks before somebody noticed that the translation said…
Guess what it means? – Answer after the break
Back in 1988, when I was finishing university near Munich I had the chance to sign up at a FEM seminar, given by Dr. Mueller from CadFem. When I realized they are 25 years in business, I remembered some of the history which I think is worth sharing.
Honestly, I could not really understand why people would use a very cryptic method to model a hook and run a pretty complex program to get displacements and stresses I could calculate by hand in a few minutes. On the other hand, we were in the early days of computer and we were using Siemens PC’s with a 286 processor, some of you might remember – which was exciting for a young engineer. Graphics - not existing, PreProcessing – “vi” at the best and PostProcessing done by tables and some b&w graphs – that’s the type of challenge we were all looking for.
Travel budgets getting tight, travel restrictions apply but you still want to stay in touch with customers and colleagues. There are more and more solutions or options available for Web-Seminar, short name Webinar, such as Webex, GoTo Meeting, Teamviewer and many others. But no matter which solution you choose or asked to use, there are definitely humans on both sides of the computer.
This discussion should give you some considerations and thoughts if you present or participate in a Webinar. It might sound profane but hey, I’m getting so fed up with this, I had to write about it.
Whether you join or present to your company buddies, your boss or your valued customers, here are the 10 most important Do’s and Dont’s :
Following my friend Alhad Joshi’s comment at LinkedIn
“Something interesting came up. Someone suggested that end-users actually do not need any data management system at all. They know where their data is.” I made up my mind and thought this would be an interesting comment to discuss.
One of my customers in this CAE data management space described the biggest value for the him was the seamless changeover if somebody in his team was replaced. The new person could immediately start where the predecessor has stopped without searching for data and files.
By automation of standards in CAE and implementing in a management system companies can have huge positive impact on the value of simulation.
However, the user might be reluctant if he has to change the way of working, thinks to lose control of his data and therefor losing power. Although this is a natural reaction, the value for the team is so huge, that most of the arguments coming from the user community might become relative.
When it comes to the question of implementing a CAE data management system, customers usually run a TCO or ROI calculation. Of course they take into account IT management effort, licensing cost, maintenance, hardware etc. and run it against time saving, reduced headcount cost etc. but rarely rate the value of collaboration improvement. There are a lot of positive and money saving effects for the customer but the exploration needs thorough and detailed discussions upfront – who spends the time for this?
“Lean Thinking” – an interesting article at Forrester Research discuss the fact that everything is becoming lean! However, in our CAE simulation world, lean has not become the number one value proposition. Processes and tools are complex to use, results are not always easy to interpret and methods still change way to frequently. It’s time for the CAE tool suppliers to discuss simplification in the use of their products, enable the full value achievement for the customer processes and make the users have fun at work! A low number of core dumps should not be the criteria for a successfull CAE tool but a fast way to simulate complex systems with special materials and physics by ordinary users! This calls for knowledge based systems, data and process management and a close collaboration of customers, suppliers and hardware vendors.
Yes, it took me more than 40 years to discover I have to say something. The world, and in particular the IT World has changed dramatically and it’s about time to talk about the experiences of an old man with Web2.0, social networks, twitter….
Kanary’s tend to twitter in general, but sometimes they learn to speak and need more than 160 characters to express themselve.
