“No man is an island”.
This quote is especially true in the world of engineering and product development. The world is flatter today than it was ever before. No new product or idea is one man’s effort. People from different parts of the world, with different skills and backgrounds, collaborate today to bring great products to the market. OEMs communicate and share engineering information and CAD files with suppliers every day. As a result of this, communication of engineering information across organizations and the outside is becoming increasingly important.
How do we work today?
I got 2 words: “incredibly inefficiently”!
Most organizations, including those in the industrial manufacturing/engineering space, use one or more of the following systems:
- Chat/messaging system
- Emails
- CAD systems
- PLM
- Third-party CAD viewers
- AND MANY MORE!
Okay- so the way we get the work done today is through using this smorgasbord of disconnected systems. But, not only is it very inefficient juggling between several disconnected systems, it’s a productivity killer having to find information across these disparate systems.
Picture this: You received an email from your Marketing group with customer feedback. They mock up the proposed product enhancements and send it via email. You need to discuss it with your team. You message and ask them to check their inbox. Once they do, you go back and forth and come up with changes, which you need to communicate back to the marketing team. You send them an updated CAD model with the changes. The marketing team downloads the CAD model attachment from their email. Assuming they don’t have access to an expensive CAD system, they use some third-party CAD viewer to view the file.
Now extrapolate this over three months where your team went back and forth fine tuning the changes, before (finally!) arriving at something that will work. If at a later date, you are ever tasked with explaining to your boss, why you did what you did, God help you! Good luck trying to find information across chat systems, email clients, CAD viewers, etc.
Enter Clariti
Clariti is a unique communication app, built by engineers, for engineers. Clariti brings chat, email and CAD viewers all in one browser-based app. Yes, you are not hallucinating. I did say chat and email and CAD viewer in the same sentence.
Here’s how your life and that of your coworkers would be different with Clariti:
Let’s revisit the same situation from earlier. When you receive the email from your marketing team with mock-ups of the customer requests, you simply invite people from your team and start chatting from within the email. Chatting from inside an email is possible — only in Clariti. There’s no need for the endless email forwards and separate messages on your chat system. When you chat from inside the email, your team has access to the email, and knows exactly what you are talking about! That’s context-based communication, a cornerstone of Clariti.
After your team makes the changes, they add the marketing team to the chat and drag & drop the CAD model in their chat application. And, bam! With one-click the CAD file opens up in the browser. There’s no need for any third-party viewer applications.
And all the iterative discussions you had starting from the initial email from marketing, to the chats, documents, and CAD files are all saved chronologically by topic for easy access later.
The new formula for clarity in engineering communication
We engineers are analytical and understand equations. So, if you wish to crystallize the 600 words before this into one single equation, this is it:
Chat + Email + CAD viewer + Cloud Storage = Clariti
Clariti not only brings all these disparate systems, to one place, and connects your communication by topic; it does something none of the other communication systems you use today does! Clariti offers built-in browser-based CAD viewers for all CAD formats. I’m talking formats like CATIA, NX, SOLIDWORKS, Creo, Autodesk Inventor, Solid Edge, JT, and more! And you don’t need to have an expensive CAD system installed either. Clariti is completely CAD-independent! With Clariti, you can share CAD files in the same communication system you use for emails or chats — for free!
The bottom line is if you deal with engineering/CAD data and use emails and chats at work, it behooves you to give Clariti a shot. It’s free, so you have nothing to lose, except to lose out on this #MEGA (Make Engineering Great Again!) opportunity!
