problems of an engineer.

New horizons in engineering data management, advancements in collaboration, and workflow productivity have catapulted the engineering design process to new heights and allowed for breakthroughs in efficiency and innovation. Basking in the glow of the constantly evolving scene and the new tool sets that are now readily available, it can be easy to lose sight of the basic building block of your engineering efforts and the common denominator in every engineering department— the engineers. After all, they've sort of gotten everything they've asked for (and probably a lot of things they didn't ask for). Now that fewer engineers are able to do more work, the administrative necessities that accompany the design process have in essentially been consolidated to smaller engineering departments. It’s a good problem to have, in the sense that it is only a symptom of increased efficiency in one part of the system without a corresponding increase in bandwidth in another part of the system, but it’s a bottleneck nonetheless.

The worst-case scenario in this position is that the engineers themselves are responding to requests for product data. Distractions from the highly focused work of designing does more than just slow everything down, it introduces more opportunities for mistakes and it’s just plain annoying for those being pulled away from their design work to fulfill information requests.

at first glance there are two somewhat unattractive options to choose from in addressing this bottleneck:

1. Expand your licensing to include access for your sales and business development department, people on the shop floor responsible for manufacturing and even vendors. Not an attractive option because on top of the expense of licensing you’re opening your vault wide open to people with less training (something that you will have to provide if you expect them to be able to use the tool at all). Basically, they’ll have more access than they need or want, and it will be a liability because the complexity of the system is designed to be a powerful tool for well-trained engineers, not a purely collaborative data storage solution (like Dropbox for instance).

1. So what’s the other option? You could designate a member of your engineering team to be the point of contact for all data requests, but it’s a poor solution for a number of reasons:
   1. You’re reducing a highly trained engineer to an errand boy, and taking him away from the work he loves.
   2. Other departments are relying on this one person for all of their access—if he’s out sick, or if there’s some confusion about what files are actually needed, there will be delays due to time spent communicating and responding to other requests.
   3. You’re definitely not saving any money this way, if you've added a full time employee to your company just to respond to requests for data from the EPDM.

Clearly not a winning proposition. Well, it’s no secret that this is a problem—ask any engineer in this position and they’ll agree that it’s a source of frustration and inefficiency.

the best solution.

Having ruled those possibilities out, here’s what you need: an affordable tool that with minimal training for end users allows access to product data in the vault. Ideally, end-users (your sales people, the people on the shop floor and design vendors) would not even have to install a piece of software on their computer—it would be server-driven. It would eliminate the need for administration of user-permissions and be intuitive to use.