Archive Blog From Knovel

Content Reduces Productivity!

Can “content” cost engineers time and money? Yes, because there are stark differences between delivering a highly tuned service that provides answers rather than generalized search engines and other content sources that sap productivity (time) from engineers! Let’s contrast Knovel against the way many engineers find answers to mission critical questions[1]. While the content itself is important (after all the “right” content is what the user needs), users tell us it is most important to seamlessly deliver the specific content required (e.g., the flexural modulus of a particular material under specific conditions or the required math to solve a problem) to the point of need. Without the tools to find, sort, manipulate, and import digital objects or “answers” into their work users tell us they often find the content itself to be more trouble (and time) than its worth.

 

So what’s the difference between casually expecting access to the content you need (e.g., Google) and knowing you can import a problem solving answer into your work when required. Independent research and our customers tell us it is worth $5,000 to $20,000 per year per engineer (up to one day per week), depending on how much research each engineer does. We publish stories about productivity gains each month (RSS feed); BP recently shared a story about one of their field engineers solving a problem and saving many hours. This is confirmed by our own quantitative analysis of engineers using tools at work – see a recent study done in partnership with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

 

Let’s consider some of the other factors that sap productivity and ultimately morale from engineers. Many engineers are asked to rely on generalized search engines for research (e.g., spending hours wading through pages and pages of “non-validated” results) vs. going to a highly tuned tool that allows you to find exactly the data you require and import it directly into your PLM environment. The figure above takes the value of the time gained into consideration but gives no value to employee satisfaction and morale (e.g., does management value me highly enough to provide tools to make my job as easy as possible?) and data validation (e.g., how do you calculate the value of validated data vs. results where the source is questionable?). So many of our customers are not only making the choice to invest in Knovel because of measurable productivity gains they are also valuing data quality and the work environment of their most valuable asset – their people. This is especially important to engineering teams that are forced to deliver on the same (or tighter) schedules with less resource in current economy.

 

If you have examples of tools or situations that have made you more productive or taken away from your productivity, please comment here or email me at [email protected] so we can learn from your experiences and pass them along to others.

 

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

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[1] Knovel’s mission is to deliver exactly the data an engineer requires to her or his point of need; our tool set is constantly optimized through user feedback to achieve this mission.

How Does Engineering Reference Drive Value in a PLM Strategy?

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a huge business segment with over $10 billion spent annually on PLM software systems alone. Every Fortune 500 company that has a manufacturing or process component to their business has a PLM strategy. When organizations put together their PLM strategies, they focus on the productivity improvements that can be gained through process improvements, organizational design and enabling technologies. The technologies considered normally include solutions for digital design, digital product data management and coordinating engineering work across departments and geographies, etc.

Knovel is a solution that enhances engineering productivity by providing external reference information as part of the engineering workflow. PLM relies heavily upon accessibility, management and flow of engineering data.

A few months back, Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity approached me with an idea on doing a research project to determine the role of engineering reference information in a PLM strategy. Since it’s a question Knovel has wrestled with, I was happy to give Jim support and agreed to sponsor the project. Tech-Clarity has just released its findings in: Tech-Clarity Insight: Engineering Reference Information in a PLM Strategy.

At risk of oversimplifying, the report concludes that electronic reference is important in a PLM strategy and makes recommendations about how engineering businesses can look at its role. I wouldn’t be doing the paper justice to attempt to summarize it here, but I pulled out a few quotes from engineering leaders Jim Brown spoke with that I found engaging. After reading them, perhaps you’ll consider downloading the report.

“Electronic access to engineering reference information enables faster and better product development, although credit won’t be given where it is due. Upper management probably doesn't care about reference information directly, however they want to make sure they are doing everything possible to enable and empower the engineering organization. They expect you to put what is required in place.”

“We learned the hard way that the capability of the search engine is very important when we decided to put our own standards on the system. We just put paper documents on screen and it was hideous, there was no search, no connection, and it just wasn’t used. The electronic world didn’t work until we added search capabilities that made this medium usable in a meaningful way. The search is brilliant, it’s critical.”

You can download the paper: Tech-Clarity Insight: Engineering Reference Information in a PLM Strategy for free at the Knovel website (registration is required). You can read more of Jim’s thoughts on the electronic reference on his blog over at Manufacturing Business Technology http://www.mbtmag.com.

Wiki Cred

I was thrilled to see a Wikipedia entry for Knovel this week. It has been up for the last several months. Several times over the last couple of years I posted entries for Knovel. The entries were quickly removed by the community of editors that saw them as not meeting Wikipedia’s content criteria which demand that entries are “factual, notable, verifiable with external sources, and neutrally presented, with external sources cited.” Frankly, my entries were blatantly commercial, did not meet the objective criteria and should have been pulled down. My designs on “Wiki Cred” and SEO (search engine optimization) benefits were dashed. There is a transfer of credibility in becoming listed on Wikipedia as the content criteria are strictly and continuously enforced by the community, so the entries that “stick” are almost universally notable and verified. While search engine algorithms are a “black box”, there is no question that they value Wikipedia entries; when searching Knovel on Google the entry now shows up on the first page of results.

So how did the entry appear? As it turns out, the initial posting was created by a small team of Knovel employees with ongoing contributions being made by interested people outside Knovel; the more contributors – via editorial improvements and reference links – the better. The Wikipedia model works! So if you have an interest in certain topics and factual data about them, I encourage you to add to Wikipedia and improve the resource for all users.

 

 

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

Productivity – How does Knovel help our customers measure it?

How do our customers justify their annual investment in Knovel or, for that matter, in any “productivity” tool? In every instance they think carefully about whether there are significant improvements in productivity, cost savings, and what their alternatives might be to get the same result. Engineering Managers and Information Professionals (the “decision makers” or “buyers”) tell us they make investments based on business cases showing how users (engineers) can save time by improving their productivity (reduce research time, accelerate time to market, faster processes, better technical service, more efficient warranty work, more cost effective designs…), providing reliable and relevant data (e.g., Google delivers too many spurious results), and cutting costs (e.g., dropping inefficient services, reduced “one off” content purchases…). These decisions are important as the dollars are often in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions.

 

A ‘trial” is widely accepted as the method for assessing the utility of a productivity tool, but measuring productivity is easier said than done. The conflict comes in setting useful productivity metrics and getting enough consistent data to measure. Managers will often agree to a “trial” for new software or an information service and find data from the trial is not gathered systematically and is qualitative and inconsistent (e.g., “the software is great and I think it can save me some time”). We help managers assess productivity by setting up “structured trials.” In addition, we have gathered a lot of data about the research habits of users from surveying thousands of engineers at corporations that have trialed Knovel. Using a well defined and repeatable process to assess productivity and historic data to set metrics goes a long way toward objectively measuring progress. The keys to which are:

 

• Setting buyer and user expectations before a trial begins
• Measuring productivity improvements quantitatively and qualitatively
• Careful design of survey questions that align with customer objectives
• A team with experience in trial process, survey design, and data analysis.

For instance, some of the measurements we might use include the level of survey participation, user estimates of time saved, and user’s views on the quality of their sessions. The real “art” is in crafting questions that yield a consistent and statistically significant set of measurable results. After a trial we work with our customers to analyze the data and compare to the agreed metrics to produce a report that will help guide their investment decision.

 

Traditionally we have focused this work on new customers but it is also important to gauge productivity gains over time and we are now beginning to survey long time users to gauge metrics and continuously assess the productivity benefit.

 

Thank-you,

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

 

Building Upon Strengths - Enhancing Knovel's Interactive Tables

Knovel has built our business and our reputation around taking engineering reference data and making it more useful. 

In talking to customers, almost uniformly, the one thing about Knovel stands out most among our supporters is that they value the fact that we take engineering content and make it interactive.  It's one thing we do better than anyone else, and it allows our users to work smarter and work faster.  And to help engineers work smarter, faster and more productively is the reason why Knovel exists. 

So to further play to our strengths, and build upon what we do well,  I am happy to announce that Knovel has just introduced enhancements to our Interactive Tables.  These enhancements make it even easier for Knovel users to work with tabular information.  Not only are the tables easier to read, but they also support drag and drop functionally, so users can move columns around, hide rows and basically manipulate data. 

So please take a look at our user announcement , link through to a newly enhanced table and check them out.   And please let me know what you think of them.

Vertical

The first issue of PC Magazine back in the summer of 1981 was a thrill to read and it was sad news this week that Ziff Davis Media has decided to cease publishing the magazine. "The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn't there anymore," Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview. This was not unexpected as all of us know that the print media business has been in a ten-degree nose-down dive for a number of years now. The more significant aspect of PC Magazine has been the early and innovative focus on "vertical".

I got to know Bill Machrone in the early 1990's. Bill had been the founder and editor-in-chief of PC Magazine. I also had the pleasure of meeting Bill Ziff on a few occasions. Both "Bills" were early believers in "vertical". Ziff Davis had the approach of publishing magazines such as Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, PC Magazine, and Computer Shopper that entertained the "enthusiasts" -- people who cared a great deal about specific technologies and products -- not generalists but those who were passionate about a particular topic and wanted to go "deep". Today we would call such market segments "vertical".

You might say that much of the evolution of the web in the early years of the new millennium has focused on "horizontal" applications and content. Many millions of users swarm to sites that are a foot deep and miles wide -- Google search where you can find anything, eBay and Amazon where you can buy or sell anything, music and photo sites where you can enjoy any kind of media, and Facebook or MySpace where you can meet anyone. Enter Tony Tjan, CEO of Cue Ball Group, a venture and growth equity firm based in Boston.

Tony has put forth an interesting perspective in a posting at Harvard that the generation of the web now evolving will certainly be more "verticalized and editorialized". Tony says that current behavior will continue as we use use large, incumbent, generalist (horizontal) sites like Google and eBay, but at the same time, there will be a strong movement toward more specialized sites. He hypothesizes that this will allow a better balance between "authoritative, expert-endorsed content and broad, less bounded user-generated information". He adds that the advertisers will follow this trend as they sharpen their focus. See Tony's full story here.

One of the best examples of a truly vertical site I can think of is what has been developed by Knovel Corporation. When I entered engineering school more than forty years ago (is that possible?), I used a slide rule and engineering reference manuals. I think of them as the first of four generations of using engineering and scientific data. The second generation was web-based data with PC's for standalone and separate analysis. Knovel Corporation (pronounced nah-vil) introduced the third generation about five years ago -- "Knovelized" data with deep search and a high degree of interactivity. Knovel brings boring reference manuals to life and in the process saves engineers and scientists many hours of effort. It is a good example of an information service that is available "on demand". The fourth generation of Knovel's vertical site currently being launched includes Ajax-based interactive graphs built with Mathematica. With no software on the PC other than a standards-based browser, the new generation of tools allows the engineer and scientist to dive deep, find the most arcane of formulas and then interact with them deeply and graphically to solve a design challenge or fulfill a research project. For millions of engineers and scientists around the world, this will be the next generation of the web -- information and tools at their fingertips -- reliable, relevant, and fast.

Disclosure: Tony and I are both investors in Knovel Corporation and members of the board of directors.

Other references to Knovel on patrickWeb

Productivity – Do you value it and, if so, how? - Volume 1.0

We think a lot about productivity at Knovel because improving productivity for engineers is our value proposition. Every time we meet customers we ask this question and get myriad responses. Some customers have very well defined measures for productivity improvement and others will rely on visceral reactions in their decision making. What is clear is that every customer values improved productivity and most want to know of methods that will help to better define productivity and how it can be measured to support investment decisions.

As I mentioned we think a lot about how to improve productivity for our customers. Recently we conducted a series of quantitative and qualitative surveys to help us better understand how engineers and engineering managers think about productivity and how they value it. We have conducted studies in concert with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), along with a series of interviews with customers and non-customers (the ones that got away). Stay tuned - over several posts we will lay out what we have learned. We welcome your reactions and questions.

Thanks,

Chris Forbes