DriveWorks Drivers connects DriveWorks users from around the world, featuring guest speakers sharing their experiences and encouraging questions and dialogue about the technology. Sharing technical know-how and practical experience informally with each other is something we know many people using DriveWorks like to do.
On September 5th, we hosted our 3rd meeting of DriveWorks Drivers for 2024. DriveWorks Drivers was hosted virtually at 3pm (BST) and 1:30pm (NZST). Hosting at different times has provided the opportunity for our global community to join at a time that suits them.
Since starting DriveWorks Drivers in 2020, we have really seen the value of getting together quarterly to share knowledge from our own team as well as talk to DriveWorks users from different industries who are using DriveWorks software.
We had over 85 people in attendance as we welcomed new members of the DriveWorks team, hosted a customer presentation and talked all things Dynamic 3D Preview!
Welcome to new members of the DriveWorks team
At DriveWorks, we are always looking to evolve and develop, and this includes expertise within our own team. We were delighted to welcome Ahmed Lasheen to the team in 2023 to support our users and resellers in the Asia Pacific region.
As part of our commitment to international growth and community support, we have recently been joined by two new members of the DriveWorks team – Ketan Panchal, Technical Territory Manager in India, and Dorian Koch, Senior Technical Specialist based in France. It was great to have both Ketan and Dorian join us for the 3pm BST meeting.
Reimagining 3D Preview in DriveWorks
In a collaborative presentation that brought together decades of DriveWorks experience, our Asia Pacific Technical Manager, Ahmed Lasheen joined forces with our DriveWorks Sherpa, Paul Gimbel, to reposition the understanding of 3D preview controls.
Through a combination of theory, philosophy, examples from the DriveWorksLive.com website, and a 3D shed configurator, they challenged the idea that 3D Previews should be reserved for photorealistic reasoning.
They demonstrated that 3D Preview, like any other control, primarily provides information to your users to help them make decisions or collects information from users that would otherwise be difficult to verbalize.
Customer Presentation: United Rentals with Maro & Associates
In this presentation, Cullen Williams, from United Rentals Trench Safety division took us through his company’s journey from using DriveWorks Solo to automate their basic trench shoring products to their latest 3D preview-enabled projects.
Cullen ran through their DriveWorks progress, and how they worked with an implementation partner, Maro & Associates, to achieve solutions that enable users to use tools such as the 3D Preview to better understand the impact of the choices that they make in their forms.
Cullen showed a wealth of forms that demonstrated United Rentals’ DriveWorks journey, provided insight into their master model strategies. He also shared how they worked with Maro & Associates to automate parts of the process while leaving other parts available for manual customization or future automation.
DriveWorks Challenge
DriveWorks Challenge #6 provided us with one really bad combo box. With 1,559 fairly cryptic items in the list, this control was not suitable for anyone. In the challenge review, we discussed the concepts of cognitive loading, supporting multiple workflows, and other techniques to boost usability.
Congratulations to our winners, Jacco Ruiter (Van Hierdan Metaal), Aleksandar Tepsic (TriMech Solutions), and Phil Gilbanks (DriveWorks Key Account Manager)!
And for those that just can’t get enough DriveWorks Challenge, Paul also unveiled DriveWorks Challenge #7, a fully working 3D Preview Plastic Toy Brick Factory. Since there is such a wide variety of skill levels with 3D Preview, there are three separate tasks of varying difficulty to choose from. Pick the one that works best for you, or you’re welcome to try all three! There is a video on the MyDriveWorks Learning Portal explaining how every aspect of the project works.
Deadline for prize submission is 29th November, so you have plenty of time to learn anything that you might need to take the challenge. Go to the MyDriveWorks Learning Portal and look for DriveWorks Challenge: Dynamic 3D Preview #7. Don’t forget, even if the deadline has passed we are still very happy to review your submissions and give you personal feedback.
Final Ascent: Getting started with dynamic 3D preview documents
And just when everyone thought we couldn’t possibly fit more 3D content into the meeting, Paul walked us through how to get started with dynamic 3D preview documents.
Anyone who thought 3D Preview was too complicated or just for pretty photorealistic images, now knows better after learning the approaches to building 3D documents (it turns out it’s just like driving models, only a little different!).
The Final Ascent segment is available to view in the MyDriveWorks Learning Portal.
See you in December
Registration is now open to join us on Thursday, December 5th for our next meeting of DriveWorks Drivers which will be hosted at 3pm NZDT and 3pm GMT.
What time is this in my time zone?
We host our DriveWorks Drivers meetings at two different times to reach more of our global community. Use this handy tool to convert the meeting times to your time zone and choose the best meeting time for you.
If you have an idea for a future DriveWorks Drivers meeting, drop us an email at drivers@driveworks.co.uk. We’d love to hear from you!