Vuuch 3.0 Released for Design Collaboration

“Vuuch has become a strategic part of the way we provide design and engineering services to our clients,” said Ash Perkins, Senior Mechanical Designer, Bleck Design Group. “We believe that the best way to manage the increasing complexity of product development today is to leverage social technology in order to better apply our design expertise to those challenges. Vuuch is the first domain-specific social technology designed specifically for the needs of product developers like us.”

New and improved features in Vuuch 3.0 A new Vuuch “product” page type has been introduced into the ESS. Vuuch product pages use BOMs (bills-of-material) to make the product development project visible to many more users than was previously possible. Vuuch product pages contain a hierarchy of other Vuuch pages, each of which manages status, development discussions, issues and tasks. With the introduction of product pages, Vuuch enables teamwork across the enterprise via a design-intent-based BOM. This new kind of BOM contains the accumulated deliverables, discussion and decisions relating to the product, not just part and assembly hierarchies. For example, with product pages, purchasing can flag and manage cost issues with specific parts or suppliers. Engineering can work with manufacturing on production issues. Vendors and suppliers will have real-time awareness of issues, leading to faster resolution. Vuuch product pages also retain all the advantages of regular Vuuch pages, including the ability to be related to other pages and dynamic access control.

Import from Microsoft Excel. Every product development team has at least one Excel spreadsheet – and probably many more – that the team uses to manage the development process. These project status files track all the issues preventing the release of the product. However, the list of items in these files is immediately outdated once the project review meeting is over. Vuuch 3.0 now offers direct import of these project tracking spreadsheets into the ESS. When project tracking spreadsheets are imported, Vuuch automatically creates Vuuch pages for each item being tracked. Once imported, development issues, tasks and discussions can be dynamically updated using Vuuch directly from the user’s preferred environment, be it the web, a CAD tool or a Microsoft Office application. Now, using Vuuch, the team has real-time awareness of everything going on with the product. With Vuuch 3.0 import, project teams can begin using Vuuch right away, even in the middle of a product development cycle, eliminating a barrier to adoption and delivering the benefits of Vuuch social product development sooner.

New web user interface (UI) and Microsoft Office add-in enhancements. Vuuch 3.0 delivers dozens of user-interface improvements that collectively make the ESS more inviting and visually appealing, especially to new users. On the web, Vuuch now offers a new home page that allows users to rapidly create new pages and activities. A “Pages & Activities” tab organizes all the Vuuch pages you are working on. Web users can now mark an activity as a personal priority, promoting it to a position of higher visibility. For Vuuch pages which track a CAD file, an image of the CAD part or assembly is automatically included on the Vuuch page, enabling users to immediately understand what part or assembly is being tracked. In the Microsoft Office add-in, Vuuch terminology has been revised to match the terms used on in the web UI, making it seamless for users to switch between the two.

“Connecting around content is the next frontier in teamwork for manufacturing,” said Jim Brown, president of research firm Tech-Clarity, Inc. “Product-centric social technology that dynamically organizes and shares product content across team participants offers significant opportunities to improve product development processes. Social computing offers enterprises something new: the opportunity to significantly expand access to product content to more users and also extend the uses to which that content is applied.”

Pricing, availability and supported systems Vuuch is available as an annual subscription. Users who create Vuuch pages require a paid license. Anyone can access those pages and update those pages without a paid license. With the launch of Vuuch 3.0, the company is offering special introductory pricing of $250 per year per Vuuch page creation license.

Vuuch 3.0 is delivered as a service, so there is nothing for enterprises to install to begin using Vuuch. The Vuuch 3.0 web UI supports major browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Optional Vuuch add-ins allow team members to access the ESS directly from within Microsoft Office 2007, SolidWorks, Autodesk AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor and Pro/ENGINEER.

About Vuuch

Vuuch, the first enterprise social system (ESS) for manufacturers, is revolutionizing the way products are developed. Vuuch’s social software is the only manufacturing-specific social technology that connects product development teams together with their deliverables, cutting time-to-market and the cost of developing products while improving quality. Founded in 2009 by a team of CAD and PLM industry veterans, Vuuch’s people-centric PLM capabilities offer manufacturers a new way to improve productivity that is compatible with existing investments in CAD, PLM and desktop applications. Vuuch is privately-held and based in Wayland, MA.

For more information, visit www.vuuch.com.

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