Participation is Mandatory?

Have you attended a Regional User Group (RUG) meeting lately? If not, why not? The RUG is a valuable resource available to all CATIA installations to share failure and success stories, to find out about new product directions, or directions for existing products. Most important, is the fact that your region typically shares the same customer or supplier base, and therefore experience the same challenges. In the end though, RUGs are only as successful as the people that participate are.

The Great Lakes CATIA Operator's exchange in southeastern Michigan is a prime example of participation and success. This group holds meetings six times a year, where the participants are exposed to a variety of strategies and operational topics, including industry trends, product directions, and vendor solutions.

For example, the next meting is on May 15, 2001, and the tentative agenda is very exciting. It covers a status briefing by COVISINT, a strategy discussion and demonstration on where the CMM inspection process could lead to on the path to CATIA V5 and a demonstration of SMARTEAM capabilities. As usual, we will have roundtable discussions, and an update from Daimler/Chrysler of milestones and announcements, pertaining to their usage of CATIA solutions. Also scheduled, is a V4/V5 Interoperability briefing by Ron Fasbinder of Matra Datavision, to help us set the stage for future meetings as we start the train rolling to move to V5.

In the future, we will be trying to adopt a theme based meeting content, which will help us to gain awareness of where we are today, and where we should be tomorrow. For example folks in Detroit are eagerly awaiting V5.7 of CATIA, perhaps as a grail of sorts. So by doing the math, the implication would be that it will be announced in the July time frame, so we will likely do a "What's new for V5.7?" meeting at September meeting. After that, it's time to help formulate the action plan and roadmap for moving to V5. In subsequent meetings, we will be discussing the core technologies of CATIA/ENOVIA/DELMIA, not just from a usage standpoint, but also to show how they fit into the future environment.

Subsequent meetings will provide the roadmap and ideas on how to provide for coexistence and interoperability of V4 and V5, and discuss migration strategies and more. Topics to be included are the hot buttons on most every ones mind. Timing, when should we move? Should we stay or move to another solution? Education, how much and what? What should we do: interoperability or full migration. What are the cultural challenges and obstacles? Certainly, there will be many more things to materialize as we travel the road of discovery.

By this time next year, it can be reasonably expected that the user community will be able to provide some feedback on their journey, and we will be there to provide the forum for them to do so.

What's that you say? You would like to hear some of these stories? Then I hope you have realized by now, participation IS mandatory.