Visualize – Collaborate – Automate

I would like to give some background to our headline „Visualize, Collaborate, Automate“ we introduced following our slogan „challenging complexity – increasing agility“, which of course is still true.

However, we wanted to bring more value to our heading as we strongly believe that the three pillars visualisation, collaboration and automation are integral values to the benefits of all our services in improving product development and your quest for continuous improvement.

Since the founding of EVOCEAN almost 10 years back we have been focusing on leveraging product development through experience, techniques and tools. It has been the combination of all three values which created the greatest leverage. Let me iterate today what we understand by these three terms. We will be giving examples in future blogs.

First of all, let’s talk about visualisation. It is essential to know that the term’s meaning depends on the context and has more than one dimension. What we understand by visualisation is – on the one hand – the abstraction in graphics, models, the graphical synthesis in user interfaces, i.e. user experience, and – more generally – a concept helping to visualise complexity. We believe in layers, in different views, each one of them having its benefit for its special purpose. Or to say it in Einstein’s words: “Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.” As expressed in the term „simplexity“, we are convinced that complexity is inherent and we need ways to manage it (refer also to systems engineering). In future, you will hear more from us in the context of visual management. We believe very strongly that visualisation helps a lot in making decisions earlier, thus helping to validate your tasks earlier. Especially in innovation projects early feedback is very important. In another dimension we also feel strongly about models in the context of Model Driven Development or Model Based Systems Engineering. Models are a way to visualize and in further steps to execute, i.e. they are also a basis to generate code, which leads us directly to the automation part.

Collaboration is key for success and is becoming ever more important. If you cannot access your data easily, cannot share, trace, collaborate with others easily, it will be tough – because while speed increases, parallel activities increase and thus teamwork gains weight. Changes need to be transparent and traceable. Having an infrastructure which supports this helps you reducing mundane non-valuable tasks and enables to excel in your product development.

Automation is always a part of an improvement. However, be aware that automation will only improve your activities and make them faster if done manually today and if the task automated are  repetitive. Further the impact it has may not have the expectation you have as the part you are automating is not a bottleneck! So sometimes you need more profound changes – i.e. adjusting your business model or, in the context of products, it’s architecture. In all these tasks and with respect to increasing your speed, automation can shortens release cycles when done correctly and will reduce time to market to stay ahead of your ever increasing competition.

In this sense I ask you to think about how visualisation , collaboration and automation will help you.

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave