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If you are investigating Vault, you may get this question from your team or management staff. What business value(s) does Vault bring? The value of Vault can be seen in three different areas.
Data – Securing your IP
Intellectual property, design data, needs to be secure to prevent the loss of valuable designs. Companies who do not have control of their IP can experience loss of important design data and can spend a lot of money for the recreation of that data. Has your company lost any IP? What was the value of what was lost? Did you identify the cause of that loss?
Taking steps to prevent future data loss can save your company the expense to recover that data. Some of the most common reasons for data loss are:
- Data scattered across multiple workstations or various network shares
- No user level permissions or restrictions for access or editing files
- Backups are not performed regularly and/or backups are not validated
- Data is overwritten in share workspaces
Implementing a PDM system like Vault can help protect your IP in the areas stated above. Also, finding and reusing data through a data management product saves engineers time and the company money.
People – Managing Data
Engineers waste a considerable amount of their time managing data. This includes searching the different repositories which have limited search capabilities. Too often the data engineers are looking for is spread across local drives, individual workstations or shared folders on a server. Not knowing which file is the latest version or if the assembly is complete can waste an engineer’s time throughout the day. Some create spreadsheets or other documentation that list files consumed by top-level and sub-assemblies. Not being able to find what they are looking for can cause the engineer to redesign what is needed unnecessarily.
Alongside securing your intellectual property, improving individual productivity is one of the fundamental benefits of Vault. Vault has both simple and advanced searching tools. What used to be an insanely frustrating search for design files can be done in seconds. Engineers can use multiple search criteria to narrow down results, and common searches can be saved, helping to save even more time.
Process – Control Engineering Processes
Engineering processes can have workflow challenges for both engineering and non-engineering staff. It can be difficult for the non-engineering staff to participate efficiently in the review and approval process when it is not management by a PDM system. For design reviews, especially, getting guidance from multiple points of view can be extremely valuable, but often is not done because it is too challenging to provide the necessary data and collect their feedback. Bill of Materials (BOM) are managed manually in a spreadsheet that is disconnected from the design data which can make it questionable.
Vault includes several capabilities specifically aimed at helping you better control your engineering processes.
- Engineers and non-engineers can help review and markup designs inside of Vault which makes it easy for anyone to provide feedback.
- More people can participate or initiate ECOs, the process is standardized, status and bottlenecks are visible, and a history is maintained that can be used as a source of information later.
- Product release is also better handled with revision management and lifecycle states. It is always clear whether a design is WIP, Released, or being Reviewed – and you always know whether you are using the right version of the design.
- By creating a direct link between your BOMs and the design files they apply to, the manual effort required to keep them up to date is virtually eliminated.
- View the status of a project by running reports on files, folders, and change orders using built-in or custom templates.
Hopefully, this provides information on your research to determine if Vault should be used at your company.
Irvin Hayes Jr.
Product Manager
