Interview with Hiep Tran – Director, Solution Architecture at The van der Roest Group

Hiep heads up solution architecture at The van der Roest Group. He has been with the group for 25 years and is involved in many of the technical activities surrounding the Group’s products and services.    

Martin:

So Hiep, tell us a little about yourself.  What do you do and what are your responsibilities?

Hiep:

Simply put, I build products and solutions for the Group.  My responsibilities involve requirement gathering, determine the best technology to meet the needs, designing solutions, and helping deploy the solutions to the customer. The projects can either be a PLM deployment, a product integrating diverse applications, ECM solution, or a cloud base/big data initiative.

Martin:

How long have you been involved in PLM activities?

Hiep:

I was involved with PLM in one way or another for the past 20 years.  It really started with PDM.  That and document management seemed to evolve into product lifecycle management and enterprise content management (ECM) as we know it today.  So, I feel like I’ve seen the migration from a data centric environment to where it is now with processes and collaboration.

Martin:

Yes, it’s been quite the vantage point for you.  So in your role today, I know you work with a number of customers.  Who are the folks you tend to work with and what are they looking for from you?

Hiep:

I focus typically on the user requirements and experiences.  They are the ones touching and interacting with the system.  I want to understand and articulate their problems beyond the initial requirements review.  And from there, develop a solution that balances something that is optimal for the system architecture. 

Martin:

And so I know that in many engagements there’s often a mix of folks you need to interact with.  What’s the typical audience mix and who do you find yourself working with typically? Is it a project manager, business analyst, or end users?  Paint that picture.

Hiep: 

What I typically run into is a mix of a business analyst and/or a champion user.  The business analyst is not necessarily as involved as a day to day user.  But often times we work with a user that is a champion for this particular type of solution. I tend to gather more information in terms of what motivates them and what real problems they are trying to find. More specifically, what are the major pain points?  From the gathering of this information we develop something that meets and exceeds their expectation. 

Martin:  So what problems do you tend to help customers with? Or we might say what application categories do you tend to work around in these projects?  

Hiep:

Recently, with PLM products. One of the key problems  revolves around processes, is how to get information from one person to another person in the most direct way without a lot of layers so that they can understand  their data, what  to do with it and how they can fulfill the business requirement.

Martin: 

And so that’s a little bit of the broad picture of the processes.  Any processes in particular, that you tend to run into, such as engineering change management, bill of materials, configuration management?

Hiep:

Change process is prevalent and universally important in any engineering and manufacturing environment.  The effectiveness of any change process starts at the beginning when CAD and design documents are introduced. Once the data is in the system, the next stage would be how to revise and change it.  That leads into an engineering change process which involves how to build a change process, how to indicate the impact, what are the effected items.   This type of thing tends to be very complicated, complex and tedious.   What we have done is try to simplify that process and highlight the most critical amount of data for the user. 

Martin: 

So how important are application integrations in this process?

Hiep: 

Integration is critical because there is not just one application running the whole business.  The integration involved at the design level to bring CAD data into the PLM environment, involves not only the file, but the right format, orientation, and type of data.  At a design level, the data could be a PDF file, or a neutral file format for a machine shop to use.   At the manufacturing level, how do I bring updated manufacturing data into ERP or a financial application?  In these instances, application integration is critical.  Manufacturing and ERP data must be in sync to reflect the right data at the right time, no more, no less. 

Martin: 

So let’s talk about your approach in solving these problems.  You’ve got a lot of experience, you know the technology, but I have to think that the problem solving approach is a key part of what you bring to the table.  Tell us a little bit about how that works.

Hiep:

I have several approaches that I use and it can be summed up into a few words… I anticipate.  Based on my experience with having worked with the system for a number of years, I anticipate the user requirements beyond the short term, beyond what is being told to me, with an eye on the end game, with an eye on how this impacts the entire business process as a whole, and beyond just the system that I am working with. 

The second approach is holistic.  Having complete familiarity with the PDM system or the PLM environment I am working with.  I want to be able to recommend the optimal solution at the right layer of the architectural stack.  And yet at the same time, as we develop being fully aware of the need for integration to any other interrelated system running concurrently to support the business process of the business operation. 

And last but not least is maintainability. In that, it’s relating to a number of development best processes as we go about developing customized code. The solutions would need to be modular and as reusable as possible.  And the key word is maintainable with the rigor of a software development discipline of testability and configuration management.

Martin:

So to bring it all together Hiep, how do you measure the success of your efforts?

Hiep: 

That’s an excellent question.  The success of an effort is measured not just on how well a solution is deployed but how well the solution is adopted by the user community.  More refinements and enhancements are requested by users and the cycle continues until it becomes a critical factor for success in the customer’s day to day operation.