Keep Teams Connected and Meetings Productive with Lean Team Player

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Have you ever left a meeting thinking nothing was accomplished? I think we can all relate to that. Well, I have good news for those Monday morning meeting blues. It’s called Lean Team Player, an interactive, visual meeting solution, available as a “role” in our 3DEXPERIENCE® Works portfolio. It is fully browser-based and runs on the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform so teams can collaborate efficiently from anywhere in the world, whether working from home in the office, or on the shop floor.

We launched Lean Team Player in 2020. It happened to be during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it helped dispersed teams stay connected and conduct productive meetings. While there are other popular meeting platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Lean Team Player has much more capabilities enabling all participants to view and interact visually on 3D content and complex data.

What’s also great about Lean Team Player is that it can be used virtually or in person as it can be accessed through a web-browser via tablets, laptops, desktops or touchscreens. With Lean Team Player everyone can work on the interface at the same time, contribute and see the changes in real time.

Lean Team Player is based on lean principles, hence its name, such as reducing inefficiencies, problem-solving, use of visual management and other proven lean methodologies we’ve incorporated in a digitized format, which I’ll discuss in more detail below.

Meeting participants using touchscreen capability on the shop floor.

 

When it comes to most meetings, they lack structure. There’s a saying that goes, “The key to a successful learning environment is structure.” And Lean Team Player does exactly that, it provides structure and an intuitive learning environment.

You’ll find it’s easy to use and equipped with interactive, time-saving tools to keep meetings proactive and productive.

Let’s look at some of the core capabilities and lean practices that Lean Team Player puts into play.

Stick to the Agenda with Structure and Time Management

With Lean Team Player you can easily set the stage for your meeting by creating your Lean Team Board with content and key information you’d like to discuss or collaborate on. For instance, you can quickly set up your meeting page to include a digital whiteboard/sketch board, called the sketch tool; a PDF viewer to pull up a report or related documents; a web page so you can pull up any URL, say you want to see the comment thread on your project from the 3DSwym community. And of course, you can easily incorporate models from the 3DPlay app. You just drag and drop your selections into the meeting space. From there you just type in names of the people you’d like to invite, and they will be added to your team board.

To keep your meeting on track you can create an agenda on the fly and Lean Team Player will guide you through the agenda topics. Plus, you can see the meeting timer counting down the whole time. We’ve found that this really helps with meetings ending on time or even early.

Visualization and Engagement- Beyond Brainstorming

When it comes to SOLIDWORKS® users who live in a 3D world, visualization is everything. In Lean Team Player you can can easily open your SOLIDWORKS file or a 3D Creator file and conduct a complete design review with your team.

Whether you’re in design and engineering, marketing or production the whole team can be a Lean Team Player. All participants in the meeting can rotate the model, draw on it, add digital post-it type notes, comment, etc.— all simultaneously.

Everyone in the meeting can add their two cents, even if it’s just sharing thumbs up or down with emoji-like stickers.

Example of digital Post-it type notes and icon of who posted.

 

Problem-solving- Ask Why

One aspect of lean principles is effective problem-solving and a classic example is to use the “five whys” approach to solve a problem. How it works is you state the problem and keep asking why with each response. For example, let’s say you design and manufacture machined parts and the company is getting feedback that the end product is failing quality checks. You’d state that sentence then ask why to each response five times. See the example below.

Our machined parts are failing inspection.

Why?

Final quality measurements are out of tolerance.

Why?

It seems like the tool paths have changed.

Why?

We uploaded new tool programming as part of an update.

Why?

I think you get the idea. You keep asking to you get to the root cause or possible issues that need further investigation.

In Lean Team Player, this and other problem solving methods are built in, and you can then tag these potential issues as a Problem or Action item that will be logged and tracked so nothing slips through the cracks.

 

Take Action!

Expanding on the above, when tagging Problems or Actions you can add contextual information like a photo and then assign the task to participants by tagging your sticky notes as action items that will be available in the Action log so you can revisit the virtual meeting board after the meeting to see assigned tasks or update notes. You can also assign the action items to the Collaborative Tasks panel on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform with due dates.

Forget reports, forget emails, with Lean Team Player you’ll have more time for taking action and solving problems.

Example of Lean Team Player interface with Action Log and Problem Log

 

Continued Improvement and Collaboration

With your meeting safely stored on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform you can continually visit the virtual meeting board to provide updates and continue the discussion. Maybe you want to update how a problem was solved and use that information for future reference. It’s all there on the platform anytime you need it.

What’s great about Lean Team Player on the platform is your team can access the logged meeting data anytime from any connected device for continued collaboration, helping teams resolve issues together.

For a demo check out this first look video below.

You can also learn more about the capabilities in this webinar: Learn How to Communicate Better Throughout Your Organization. Sign up at https://www.solidworks.com/media/webinar-learn-how-communicate-better-throughout-your-organization.

For more information visit https://www.solidworks.com/product/lean-team-player.

 

Adrian Wood

Adrian has spent over 20 years in customer-facing positions ranging from sales and marketing, to fulfilment and account management. His career focus has been on problem solving and development within emerging and rapid growth segments to enable customer success across a wide range of industries from High Tech to Retail and Logistics and across multiple disciplines such as Supply Chain, Manufacturing Simulation and Analytics.