Evolving Technology with a Consistent North Star: Lessons from Jim van Oss at Moog

Come join Share PLM for another podcast episode with Jim van Oss, a PLM veteran with over 39 years of experience at Moog (currently retired) and a Senior PLM Strategist for FYES. Jim specializes in PLM strategy and data models, intellectual property, Engineering and IT Management.  

Join us in this podcast episode as we dive deep into:

⚉ Who is Jim van Oss
⚉ Moog's Journey and Product Portfolio
⚉ Early Days of CAD and PDM Systems
⚉ The shift to PLM system
⚉ Implementing PLM at Moog
⚉ Integration of ERP and PLM Systems
⚉ Three main strategies for PLM at Moog
⚉ The future of PLM and Artificial Intelligence
⚉ Trademarks and Intellectual Property
⚉ Managing organizational change
⚉ Jim's advice for successful transformation
⚉ Takeaways

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

⚉ [Book] Product Lifecycle Management: Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking by Michael Grieves - https://amzn.to/4cvlBJi
⚉ [Book] The Digital Twin by Noel Crespi, Adam T. Drobot, Roberto Minerva - https://amzn.to/3VzSSfD
⚉ [Book] Virtually Perfect: Driving Innovative and Lean Products through Product Lifecycle Management by Michael Grieves - https://amzn.to/4cueGQy 

CONNECT WITH JIM:
⚉ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jvanoss/

CONNECT WITH SHARE PLM:
⚉ Website: https://shareplm.com/ 

Join us every month to listen to fascinating interviews, where we cover a wide array of topics, from actionable tips, to personal experiences, to strategies that you can implement into your PLM strategy. 

If you have an interesting story to share and want to join the conversation, contact us and let's chat. We can't wait to hear from you!

Transcript

[00:00:00] HELENA:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to SharePLM's podcast. Today we have a very special guest and we have also Joss Wasquill with us. Hello, Joss.

[00:00:11] JOS:
And first of all, I'm very glad and honored to speak with a field expert from the other side of the ocean because both Helena and I, we meet a lot of people in Europe and it's now our first interocean connection.

So welcome Jim, and Jim we have been working for more than 39 years in Moog and we met in 2018 in the PLM conference, PLM roadmap in Stuttgart, where you talked about additive manufacturing enabled supply chain.

So also a quite a hot topic at that time. And after that, we have been in touch through my blog posts where you sometimes gave feedback on your experiences in the field. And therefore, yeah, I'm looking forward now to talk to you about your real journey and impressive journeys with Moog. And I want to learn from you how you kept up with technology with people and existing business. So Jim, a warm welcome, and please start with a short introduction. Who is Jim van Oss and what is he doing? 

[00:01:15] JIM:
Jim Van Oss, originally from Paris, France. So I am from your side of the ocean originally, but most recently the United States since I was four. I have a couple of degrees in mechanical engineering. I worked at a very small machine tool manufacturer for a very short time, and then I joined Moog doing engineering and primarily trying to implement analysis and CAD. So I spent my whole career starting with CAD, starting with drawings and then eventually stepping through all the different phases of CAD. 

So 2D, 3D wireframe, 3D surfaces, 3D solids, et cetera. You know the story and also doing a lot of finite element analysis and the such. And then once you get into CAD, you want to store the CAD and you need some way to, to render the drawing. So you start playing around with PDMs and that started my little journey into IT. So I did above 15 years in engineering, 17 years in IT maybe a little bit more.

So, you know, that was my journey getting and all along the way I took Moog from drawings all the way through PLM, ultimately, where they are now.

[00:02:20] JOS:
Okay, great. So yeah, that's really, uh, as you started with the 2D drawings, uh, really a long journey and yeah, knowing more again, the model based, it's also, yeah, I would say still like an advanced topic. Can you say a little bit about Moog, what are they doing? What type of products?

[00:02:36] JIM:
So Moog is a, uh, currently a 3 billion aerospace and industrial company focused on motion controls. They make a lot of flight controls, spacecraft controls and industrial motion control devices, mostly they started out as hydraulics with the servo valve, um, that then, you know, you put a servo valve on an actuator, you put a feedback loop on it, and you can control things like missile fins and airplane, airplane primary flight control surfaces, but they've stepped into electromechanical and a number of other technologies  lately they were they got into some additive, metal additive manufacturing where I got re involved in some of that. Did some work around blockchain. So MOGA is sort of a big, diverse, multinational company. Headquartered here locally near Buffalo, New York in a little town called East Aurora.

[00:03:23] HELENA:
I'm curious Jim, how did you personally got involved in PLM when you started your career?

[00:03:30] JIM:
When I started, I was doing a lot of magnetic analysis and ultimately structural thermal finite element, creating a lot of artifacts along with doing design work.

And you end up buying a lot of computers and a lot of CAD systems. And then with CAD systems, you get a lot of files of that represent parts. And then we got interested in how to, how to render those. Ultimately it was I moved in from engineering into engineering IT, and then we were presented with a problem on how to get drawings online. And fortunately we had saved HPGLs and these are the plot files, if you go back far enough.

And then we ended up implementing IMAN, which is the predecessor to Teamcenter, and created an application to basically put the drawings from a guarded directory in Teamcenter or IMAN into sort of this web based drawing display program that we had homegrown and we ended up eliminating microfiche related printers.

And if you remember, you have these sort of hollerith cards with a little window of a drawing in it. You go to a very large file, you look up your drawing, you pull it out, put a little marker so you can put it back where it came from, put it in a very expensive machine, and it sort of spits and groans and creates a very greasy Larger drawing that you can then use for issuing stock or, you know, looking at a, you know, doing some calculations or, or assembly or what have you. 

And so that was taking a long time at Moog. And so we put the drawings online ultimately, and that led to reducing cycle time in the shop from a few days to issue material to a few minutes. And so that was a big value. But we also thought it'd be very available for the engineers because engineers stock and trade is looking at drawings and trying to figure out, you know, what to do for analysis or design changes or what have you. And so as this thing evolved throughout the years we ended up with a sort of a volume of about 6 million drawings per year served to the engineers. So sort of the killer app on our intranet and it really made our intranet take off. 

So that was, you know, ended up being very successful and, um, probably allowed me to become the CIO for, you know, that was, you know, I had just finished that and then they were looking for a CIO and I, well, here I am, I've done all this stuff, been successful. So I got the job. I had the job for 13 years, which I think is the longest tenured CIO I've worked to date.

[00:05:47] JOS:
Okay. Yeah. So, uh, Helena, we are not from the same generation. Jim and I, I think, are the same generation. HPGL says a lot to me. Sharing information on the internet was not that obvious. So, uh, I think it's quite logic, Jim, that you also had to deal with a lot of it. Issues at how to connect just, uh, sites and, and even people internally.

Intranet became in fashion at that time uh, because now we are talking a lot about, also, we have to look at the end user. How important was the end, end user in the early days? Was the technology the driver or?

[00:06:21] JIM:
It was really critical because the end user needed something easy to use. And so having the end users use I man, or, or the early days of team center to find drawings, cause all they want is a drawing. It has to be easy. So we ended up sort of protecting them from that technology and delivering basically an integration at the glass.

So we provided a bill of material from our ERP, which is an old line IBM mainframe system. We took everything that looked like a part number. And we, we hot linked it to a search engine. So it looked like it was all integrated, but it wasn't. But the background software would look to see a part number it would make it a hyperlink and then somebody could click on it and then it would take you to the search engine, find the drawing and then serve you the drawing. So it looked integrated, but it wasn't.

[00:07:06] JOS:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. The trick with the hyperlinks in the beginning, I mean, yeah,

[00:07:11] JIM:
This was the early days. So back in the day, I was doing a lot of CAD implementation, trying to get everybody to use Unigraphics at the time and we had settled on Silicon Graphics workstations. They had the best Unix workstations at the time. Again, this is ancient history, but in the Unix world, before the PCs got more powerful enough to run, run teams or run Unigraphics, we use Silicon Graphics.

Silicon Graphics came with a very nice web editor. And we were enamored with that. And that's how we started the intranet. We said, well, we could put the drawings online and this will be sort of a killer app, and we can get a lot of use and a lot of value. So we got a lot of value out of it.

[00:07:48] JOS:
But at a time, yeah, it was not, as you said, integration, it was really creating visibility of the locations of the drawings through hyperlink. 

[00:07:56] JIM:
So it was very much a PDM system. You know, as I said, integrated at the screen. You didn't have to, it wasn't integrated completely like it is say these days.

[00:08:05] JOS:
And when did the discussion start, uh, the link between ERP and PDM, or did you still in the beginning say PDM or PLM?

[00:08:13] JIM:
It was PDM up until about 2015 when I was tasked with sort of re implementing team center at the time.

Then at that point, the platforms, ERPs, PLMs were mature enough where you actually could integrate them and then, you know, at the time Moog was beginning another journey to change from their homegrown ERP to SAP, which they're still on that journey, by the way. It's, it'll be a long journey. So they have an integration now. So it moved from sort of drawing display integration of the glass to integrate a platform so you don't have to rekey information back in the day. They were putting bills of materials on the faces of assembly drawing, carefully lettering it with a CAD system, which is not optimal. 

And so with, with the, um, re implementation of PLM that I started in 2015, we started to use the, the capability of team center to store the bill of materials in a true database, you know, in a real database application. We also ultimately sunset of that, that drawing display application into team center.

So now it's all served out of team center. Now it's completely integrated and doesn't perform quite as well as it used to, but it's good enough.

[00:09:22] JOS:
Right. Yeah. 2015 seems recently, but it's already, again, more than 10 years ago uh i mean yeah. But meanwhile, I think also technology changed that because, uh, as, as we know, also more from model based engineering, was that at the same time that you were moving from drawing based to model based or was it later?

[00:09:42] JIM:
I was given this, so I was at the time I was, I had just come out of working in IT, I was actually working as a product line engineering manager for our rocket engine, propellant control part of our business. And they, they asked me to take a lateral move and they asked me two questions. Could you put a PLM in space and defense, which was the smallest of the, of the operating groups at Moog. It was about a 400 million group. And could you get rid of drawings? Because drawings are expensive. Those are the, those are, that, that was my, that was the two things they asked me to do. 

[00:10:13] JOS:
Okay. 

[00:10:14] JIM:
So I said, well, I better make this strategic. So I started out by myself in 2015 putting together a little project or actually a strategy. And so the strategy ended up being strategic to the point where when I left in 2000 in January of 24, there was 80 people working on the project. So it ended up being pretty successful, pretty valuable. 

There was three main thrusts of, of three main strategies for PLM. So model based definition can get into a lot of that, eliminating the data chase, and then the final one, which I put in there, uh, we never really did it. I don't think anybody's doing this curating intellectual property. So, you know, model based definition takes you through real BOMs, not lettered on drawings and tracking the BOMs, integrating with SAP, and then creating a bill of information.

So the bill of information is tracking all the artifacts that you create when you do a drawing, so, you know, all the simulations, all the calculations, the notes, the analysis and so on, all the artifacts that an engineer will create. They typically store that anywhere and everywhere, SharePoint, hard drives in a box under their desk, you know, some cloud drive. And then as, as people move through their jobs, they lose track of information. They lose track of where that is. They can always find the drawing, but they can never find the artifacts as to why the thing was designed the way it was or why it was sized the way it was.

So we put our architecture together to do all that within the PLM system. So that'd be game, it began to become a true PLM system and that sort of helped with the data chase. So if you could find everything easily and what PLMs do, PLMs are good at keeping track of things and relationships of things, that's all they do. 

[00:12:00] JOS:
Right, yeah. 

[00:12:01] JIM:
And so you take advantage of that of thinking so I sort of relate this to, say particle physics. So, for a long time, people thought the most fundamental building block of things was, was the atoms. And then they eventually discovered, oh, there's electrons and protons and neutrons and then muons and all these other goofy little, little particles. Same thing with, with the bill of material. The fundamental building block isn't the part. It is the part, but below the part, there are materials, there are properties. There are facts and so on, and there's intellectual property. So we sort of basically created that data model and allow people to use it.

And so people are beginning to use that as a true PLM that then complements model based definition, helps you find stuff. We also did a lot of work in classification. So you can basically set up the hardware store internally and then put things away on the proper shelf and the proper bins so that if you want to go find it, reuse it, you can find it and reuse it.

So that's the sort of thing we did. So that ended up being strategic and got funded and rolling it out to the entire aerospace part of the company.

[00:13:01] JOS:
Okay. Okay.

[00:13:02] HELENA:
Jim can you, can you sell some tips about how you frame the priads so that it caught the importance required to make it strategic and successful?

[00:13:13] JIM:
It was to enable reuse because a lot of times that if you can't find something, you'll just reinvent it. And that's expensive. So being able to enable reuse with classification, the bill of information, model based definition, so technical data packages and actually using the CAD system for making models. So for me, model based definition was making things that both the humans and the machines can read.

Right. That's the real use. That's the real value of model based definition. So we focused a lot on value to the company and not necessarily, um, GWIS capabilities. So things like, you know, eliminating drawings, building material with integrations into the ERP.

So you don't have to rekey the information because every time you do that, as you know, you get, it gets lost. So, you know, and then finally was the intellectual property piece that. That I pushed a lot, but never really took off.

[00:14:05] JOS:
Okay. Did you have to make a business cases for those transitions, Jim, or was it, uh, people trust your technology concept and say, yes, this is the right way to go.

[00:14:16] JIM:
When we originally did it, no, because we were sponsored out of engineering. So engineering sponsored it and not IT, I was working in engineering at the time. They thought it was valuable because I was in a CIO for a long time, I was in the management teams for a couple of the operating groups. So I had good relationships with the top management there. So I showed them… 

[00:14:35] JOS:
You already had the, yeah, you had the authority as a CIO. Yeah. 

[00:14:39] JIM:
So I showed them the strategy and one of the group presidents said, this is really good. We should show this to the CEO. So they had a quarterly meeting, showed it to the CEO, had a pitch at a few times to the aircraft group. They finally saw the light and said, we're in. And then, you know, at that point, then we had a project and it took off and we got funding.

[00:14:59] HELENA:
You have mentioned CAD, you have mentioned PDM, PLM throughout your, your long career, you have seen many of these technologies evolving. How do you envision the future of PLM and what are some emerging trends that you are keeping an eye on?

[00:15:15] JIM:
Everybody's talking about artificial intelligence, and I think the use of more competent internal search engines using AI or the like that will protect IP. Cause people don't really put all their stuff you know where chat GPT or copilot or what have you.

They need this, those sorts of tools internally because still there's quite a bit of information floating around on corporate networks. That is unstructured data that needs to be related to each other. And there's, it's just too expensive to relate it all. I mean, you can do it on a go forward basis if you've got a good data model and people actually use the system, but you have, you know, a ton and ton of legacy data that you'd like to go harvest and find. So I think getting all that to work, the platform strategies, so you know real ERPs and real PLMs that really integrate to each other the model-based definition, I think people are using AI a lot in requirements management. So that's again, another area where. You can really leverage the kinds of tools.

So, and this is, I think, early days of AI, this is sort of like the early days of the dot com boom, right? When people are discovering the web, people are only now discovering AI. They'll figure out really interesting uses of it. None of, you know, I probably can't predict them all, but, so I think that's an area that's going forward. 

I think people are also still in the learning curve of getting from drawing based, you know, a drawing based workflow, you know, the drawing paradigm to model based and to technical data packages and to seeing something on a screen, whether it's a computer or phone or tablet or what have you is that how's all the information they need, but they have to sort of query it, right?

So technical data package. Because if you eliminate drawings from companies, you know, their heads will explode. They can't, they won't be able to work. So you need to sort of gently take them through that journey, the same sort of journey we did when going from the vellum 2D CAD all the way to 3D solid bottles and, and doing that sort of thing. Um, and, and all the practices that go with it, you know, like mid dimension tolerancing and that sort of thing.

[00:17:14] JOS:
I remember our discussion about the additive manufacturing at that time in the conference and, uh, at that time I was still talking about the my model approach instead of, uh, the hybrid approach of connected and coordinated and you were saying, oh, that, that additive manufacturing, the, the process, the three day 3D as a center was a complete new for part of the organization. You had a kind of hybrid organization already at that time. Correct?

[00:17:39] JIM:
Yeah. Yeah. So additive is very interesting. So complexity is free with additives. So if you make something very complex, it's free. It doesn't cost more like what's attractive. But with additive, the real problem, at least in regulated industry, like the, when I worked in an aerospace, what material properties will you get. When you make something out of metal, you're basically remelting it and there's not a good pedigree for what you get out of the process and the same, two different copies of the same machine making the same part will come out with two different properties. And the machines, I think these days are still open loop. They need to be closed loop. I think a lot of people are working in that area. We got interested in additive, at least I did around blockchain technology. So we were, you know, sort of pitching some of that. If you Google or search Veripart, that's a little trademark I came up with at Moog, um, that sort of tracks the provenance of, of the materials, the process, the requirements, and the IP for additive parts, so you don't, basically you don't have them.

[00:18:39] JOS:
If we zoom in on additive, I'm just realizing at that time in 2018, It was a booming discussion, how has it evolved till now? How much, how important is additive now still in?

[00:18:50] JIM:
I think it's still got its niche, but I think it's sort of the Gartner hype cycle, right? So you get the sort of second order curve where it, where it peaks up and everybody's very excited about it. Then all of a sudden reality sets in and, oh, maybe it's not as good as it, we think it, we thought it was. It's not the answer to everything. 

So I think it's sort of settled on the downhill part of that curve. I think they're still doing it, but they're not really as energized with it as they were. But, but it's certainly, they're not out of the business, but they're, they're not, you know, investing as heavily. At least that's, that's my, my recollection since I left not too long ago.

[00:19:21] JOS:
Yeah. Now we have AI as the new hype.

[00:19:23] JIM:
Yeah, AI will now take over. Additive will still go along. It'll get better. People will figure it out and it'll become accretive. 

[00:19:32] HELENA:
And you've talked about many of these evolutions and transitions and those hypes. How do you see from your experience, how do people learn to work differently when there is such a new technology coming in, such as AI now or in the past PLM or PDM? How do people get on board?

[00:19:53] JIM:
Well, that's a real trick, getting people to work differently. As you know, I like I told you before I've been through a lot of different changes in how people work. And as you go through these C changes of, you know, 2D to 3D, 3D to solids, PDMs to PLMs, you know, separate and then integrated, now AI, additive it becomes a lot for people to take in and they sort of have to, you have to actually use this stuff to really make it part of your toolkit. And I found that older employees may not be as amenable to really taking on these new tools because they may be toward the end of their careers and I don't need to know this. I can just do what I was doing. I was doing what I was doing before and I can just continue to do that. 

So I think the companies will change. And I think the newer generation who haven't figured out, Oh, this is how I do it, so I can always do it this way. They're more malleable and open to new processes. I think the younger generation will begin to do that. So you basically have this friction of the older generation or the, or the employees that don't want to change so much with the new ones who want to change a lot, but they don't have the experience. Right. So you have to sort of get, I mean, you've seen this, this, this is very typical. So I think it's the same changes with different technologies.

[00:21:07] HELENA:
Right.

[00:21:08] JIM:
It's the same thing over and over again. 

[00:21:09] JOS:
Yeah, I mean, here we see commonality on both sides of the ocean from your hands, often when we generalize, we say you and you are so depending on the cultural, so very nitty gritty on all the details. And we want to know everything before we do a next step where we say the Americans, they buy the software, they start working and they go with it. Is this a generalization true or did you have to do also a lot of nitty gritty stuff?

[00:21:35] JIM:
Well, I, I guess I'm mostly American now, so I'm very big on ambiguity. So I'm, I've always taken a lot of risks and tried stuff that I've never done before, figure out, I'll figure it out. We'll get it done. And I've done that. I've done that throughout my career and maybe in Europe, maybe they're more conservative. I don't know.

But I think you have to have a little bit of, of risk taking to do this sort of thing. You know, with enough knowledge that you say, oh yeah, we can get this connected, we may not know exactly how we're going to do it, but you know, it seems like we can connect all the, all the knowns are known and we just need to connect them. So that's typically how I would count, how I would set it.

[00:22:12] HELENA:
What advice would you give to other organizations implementing a new transformation from your 40 years of experience? What would you give?

[00:22:22] JIM:
My advice would be focus on strategy, come up with a strategy that's really good and cohesive and takes care of all the pieces and is, is really compelling. So if you've got a good strategy you know, I kept going back in the eight or nine years I was working on this latest PLM project was going back to the strategy and saying, how does what we do match with the strategy?

The strategy is also help support the business case. And if you stick to that, then I think you'll be successful. But if you just are just implementing the net, if you're just putting in the latest new version of team center or, or windchill or, or DeSoto, Inovia, what have you. Yeah, that's not really interesting.

What's really interesting is, is being able to architect these systems to provide value to the end user and make their lives better and, and, and really letting engineers do engineering rather than finding information.

[00:23:12] JOS:
And when you talk about the strategy, is it a five or 10 years strategy building a vision or is it…

[00:23:18] JIM:
We didn't really have a timeframe on it. We sort of had an end goal. So it was really getting the model base is a journey. You know, as you know, um, so putting the data model together, doesn't get you in a model base, at least enables model based, eliminating the data chase provides some near term value.

So you kind of have to provide some near term value with some long term strategy. So that's what we put together was a bit of both. And that really carried, carried the day for us. It allowed us to really see it through and have enough legs to, you know, to get to an 80 person team, you know, I don't know, 15, 000 person company. So it, it really got a lot of traction.

[00:23:55] JOS:
And Elena already asked you about what were your advices and, and, and if I were to turn it the other way around, what would you never do again?

[00:24:03] JIM:
I would still do the strategy, but I would not try to implement as many pieces of the strategy all at once that we tried. You know, we were trying to do requirements management and integrated materials management and, you know, standard parts and this and that, you know, there's all these things we're trying to get done.

And you know, we ended up doing too many things and some of them maybe not as well as we should have. So I think a little more focus on, part of the strategy is what you're not going to do. And maybe we didn't do enough of that.

[00:24:30] JOS:
Exactly, yeah. And more, I would say, as a journey than a big bang.

[00:24:36] JIM:
Yeah, yeah for sure.

[00:24:38] JOS:
So given the time, I think also we have to talk about IP. You mentioned your, your favorite new topic and IP is a hot topic also in the PRM world. Especially if you start collaborating. Even now when you're not connected, how do I, do I not expose my IP, what are your findings and research at the moment on this topic?

[00:24:58] JIM:
So IP falls into sort of two categories, you know, people will have a drawing of a widget, you know, that they'd say, Oh, this trade secret and it's our IP, but if you, so a lot of times we had a lot of trade secret drawings, that presumably had IP on it. But if you show it to an engineer, they couldn't tell you why it was IP, why it was trade secret. 

So there's the what of trade secret or IP. And there's the why. The why is really important. So why is this servo valve, or this widget, or this motor, or this part, why is it trade secret? Because you may make 80 copies of it with different permutations. It's all trade secret for the same reasons. And if you don't preserve the why, you're doomed to forget it or relearn it. And so I put together a little model on curating why something is trade secret, having another layer of security around that so that you could protect the reasons of trade secret and use that to train your new engineers and then, and tag that in the PLM in a manner where the, the drawing or the assembly would be trade secret because it had all these little trade secret IP objects, created an entire architecture around that. There are different types of intellectual property, some of which you care about, and some of which you shouldn't like there's, you know, trade secret, proprietary, there's third party IP, there's IP that belongs to somebody else, you may have licensed it.

There may be patents or there may be, there may be IP that belongs in the public domain, you know, that you, that, you know, it's just there, you shouldn't mark that proprietary cause you don't need to protect it.

And so creating an architecture that, that does that have, and then creating a, a process and discipline with an engineering to manage all that. And so think of, of intellectual property objects as internal patents. So you don't have to be a cost of a bureaucracy. The employees would get credit for it. You could give people credit. Oh, you created this little IP or this IP. And then, you know, having some board of review for it. So this is a really different thing. Most companies don't do this. But it, it really identifies the value of your IP. What's important and why. And then, so you know what to protect and what not to protect. Cause otherwise you don't know.

[00:27:04] JOS:
In a way, aerospace defense is, of course, a lot of IP protection in the work you are doing on IP, are there any, uh, reference groups, people you, you're working with?

[00:27:15] JIM:
No, I haven't found, I found a couple of papers. I could dig up on my computer that's some mostly lawyers, you know, you know, intellectual property lawyers put together. But it's not really well known across the technical community, the technical engineering community that I've found. So at Moog, I couldn't get much traction around it, I tried. And so it's still sort of something bumping around in my head that I'd like to, to really, you know, do somewhere somehow with somebody. But I think it's, it's a compelling model. It has value. I think it would help companies with lots of, you know, intellectual property that they want to protect and preserve and ultimately train their new engineers on so they don't forget it and it, it will fold into PLM quite nicely.

[00:27:55] JOS:
Okay, yeah, what you see, at least in the automotive industry now, uh, have you heard about Catena X?

[00:28:01] JIM:
No.

[00:28:02] JOS:
It is a German, uh, initiative for data sharing between all stakeholders in the automotive industry, a little bit based also on web three. That means you share what you want to share, and you have all kinds of adapters on this I would say digital highway compared to our previous podcast. 

And it seems that Katina X is taking off in the whole automotive industry as a way to connec all stakeholders and also the material suppliers, the partners, to, to create an infrastructure for data sharing and still respecting the IP that remains inside. So you have to identify yourself, what is IP and what not for sharing.

[00:28:41] JIM:
Well, that's the key, isn't it?

[00:28:42] JOS:
Yeah. 

[00:28:43] JIM:
You can't protect it if you can't identify it.

[00:28:45] JOS:
Yeah, so I was curious if something similar was happening in aerospace or defense industry, but

[00:28:51] JIM:
Not, not to my knowledge.

[00:28:52] JOS:
They're probably, yeah, the volumes and the margins are different than in the automotive.

[00:28:57] JIM:
Yeah. I mean, I was just at realized live last month. People talk about IP, but they don't really talk about IP. So they say, Oh yeah, it's our drawing. It's our IP. They wave their hands around, but they really, I mean, if you really push them, they don't know what it is. What are you protecting? If you can't identify it, you don't really know what it is.

[00:29:12] JOS:
So there is still work to do as a professor.

[00:29:15] JIM:
I think so.

[00:29:17] HELENA:
I have really enjoyed a lot of our conversation and the advice you have given us. Focus on strategy, focus on value and focus on prioritization. Can you share any books or resources or mentors that have been particularly influential in your journey?

[00:29:34] JIM:
So there was one author that I read. I've not met the gentleman. Michael Greaves, product data, product lifecycle management is a really, really good book. I mean, really highly recommended. And then he's got a follow on book that I don't recall, doing more with model base. He's got two books.

I'll have to look, look up the other one, but he really figured it out, I think. And, and it's, it's a bit long. You have to really read it and sort of dog ear it and highlight it. But if you look at the two Michael Greaves books, um, those are really good books and they'll be quite helpful in anybody's journey.

[00:30:07] JOS:
Right. Michael Greaves is also a Mr. Digital Twin. I don't know if that was the other book. 

[00:30:11] JIM:
Yeah, I think the digital twin is the second book. I don't remember. I have it. I just don't have it handy.

[00:30:17] JOS:
Okay.

[00:30:18] HELENA:
Thank you. We will put that in the notes so that the listeners can check that out.

[00:30:23] JIM:
Sure. I can, uh, I'll send you some links to it.

[00:30:26] HELENA:
And finally, what do you hope listeners will take away from this podcast episode?

[00:30:30] JIM:
Well, work on strategy, work on the greater good for your users. That's the thing that, that motivated me in my career. I did a lot of engineering, spent a lot of time looking for stuff. And you know, if you're looking for stuff, you're not doing engineering. So try to get people to make, be more productive and really do engineering and have fun doing what you're doing, because that's what's important.

[00:30:49] HELENA:
I love that.

[00:30:51] JOS:
Okay. Thanks, Jim. And thanks taking us through the journey that I also went through in my life. I mean, seeing the good old, uh, 2D drawings, not minimum connectivity. It's a big journey if you look back.

[00:31:02] JIM:
It is. And we've both been through the oddly, we've been through the same journey. I bet you lots of people have been through this journey.

[00:31:09] JOS:
So again, thank you.

[00:31:11] HELENA:
Thank you, Jim.

[00:31:12] JOS:
Looking forward to discuss IP in the future.

[00:31:15] JIM:
Love to take care of guys. Thanks for the time.