Tag Archives: Kenesto

Kenesto 2013 now focuses on Social Business Collaboration

January 28, 2013 By in 3D Design, CAD, Computer Industry, New Technologies, Social business collaboration Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

28 Jan 2013: Last week I had the opportunity to meet, via the web, with Stephen Bodnar and Maya Olsha-Yehiav of Kenesto, the startup featuring Mike Payne as CEO. Bodnar is Vice President, Products and Marketing; Maya Olsha-Yehiav is Director of Customer Success.

The topic under discussion was the announcement yesterday of what Kenesto calls their Unified Social Business Collaboration Platform, a substantial change from their former business strategy offering a cloud based workflow based system.

For some background information readers can review my two previous blogs about Kenesto.

Kenesto was formerly a cloud based workflow system. Here, from my previous “what is it” blog, is a description of what they formerly did. “Aimed at the category called business process automation, this cloud-based application allows asynchronous spawning of processes. Different from similar systems that try to model processes, Kenesto builds processes on the fly. Users wanting to track a process they are initiating, for instance an ECO, initiate a process, attach documents to it, and add users to the next process by adding their email addresses. Different types of “next processes” can be defined, such as “review and approve.” At each step in the process the recipient can add additional processes that add steps to the overall process. Kenesto builds the process diagram as steps are added. Note that this differs significantly from the BPM (Business Process Modeling) approach that models processes using a cumbersome programmatic approach. Kenesto calls it Business Process Automation (BPA).”

Kenesto 2013’s Kenesto Social Business Collaboration platform expands on their workflow system by adding extensive capabilities that vastly expands their offering by adding collaboration on documents, document storage sharing and control, team building and messaging collaboration among the team, and a text based team capture and audit trail. Users can also build multiple teams, and invite users to teams. Documents automatically link to related viewers and more than 200 are currently offered, including special extensions for viewing of Revit documents.

Pricing

Pricing has now changed from buying of bundles of processes to a more traditional user based pricing. This chart is taken directly from the Kenesto.com website.

Kenesto Pricing chart

Definitions of interest (from Wikepedia)

  • Social collaboration refers to processes that help multiple people interact, share information to achieve any common goal.
  • A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections.

Conclusions

Bodnar described what they are doing as both social business and collaboration. For companies to realize social business they usually have to deploy 3 to 7 separate technologies. For example: specialty social business sites include: Yammer, Chatter, Socialtext, Nuage, file sharing sites like Dropbox, etc. Kenesto incorporates many of these into one.

While I am a CAD/PLM guy, not a social collaboration expert, I can see quite a few things in the Kenesto demo that seem really useful. You can organize teams, add people to it, add documents that can be shared, and record textual comments of the entire team. Of course, documents can be any type of document. Different than a doc sharing site such as Dropbox, you have limited control of access to the document, for instance, viewing only. Other elements can be added, such as workflow. Bodnar states that Kenesto is “**highly** complementary to the existing PDM/PLM tools.” It seems to me that this offers more ready access to design data than many PLM systems of today. While PLM systems are more rigid in document control, they are often very difficult to navigate. Perhaps there might be some middle ground by coupling the two systems.

In summary, different than many other social business sites, Kenesto provides multiple capabilities. It’s a cloud based, secure document sharing site, has team groups, document (including CAD) viewing for team members, task management, and a history audit trail of team communication.  Yet, the solution is a general solution applicable to many areas other than engineering and design.

Try it yourself by joining the free Kenesto Community at http://www.kenesto.com .

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Steve Bodnar leaves Autodesk for Kenesto

September 18, 2012 By in Executive Migration, Manufacturing industry, PLM Industry Tags: , , 1 Comment

Stephen Bodnar joins Kenesto as Vice President, Products and Marketing

—See ‘My Take’ below—

WALTHAM, MA–(Marketwire – Sep 18, 2012) – Kenesto Corp., provider of cloud-based Social Process Management solutions today announced that Stephen Bodnar has joined the company as Vice President of Products and Marketing.

“We are very pleased to have Stephen join our team. As the demand for cloud-based business solutions continues to grow, Kenesto’s Social Process Management solution is gaining increased market traction,” said Kenesto’s CEO Michael Payne. “We are excited to begin a significant growth phase under Stephen’s marketing and products leadership.”

“I am extremely excited by the opportunity to join the Kenesto team,” said Mr. Bodnar. “Companies in industries such as manufacturing, architecture, engineering, and others are increasingly looking to leverage cloud, social, and mobile technologies to improve productivity. By automating day-to-day business processes such as managing Change Orders, managing Engineering Change Requests (ECR), and communicating bid proposals, Kenesto enables our customers to increase agility, responsiveness, and productivity across the value chain.”

Mr. Bodnar comes to Kenesto with a 24-year career in B2B technology development and marketing. Prior to joining Kenesto, he served as the Vice President of Product Data Management (PDM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) at Autodesk, Inc., where he led the growth of Autodesk’s Vault PDM business by 15x over four years. Most recently, Mr. Bodnar oversaw the launch of Autodesk into the discrete PLM market with the introduction of the cloud-native PLM 360 solution.

Mr. Bodnar began his career serving Chrysler Corporation in its Engineering and CAD/CAM/CAE groups. After eight years with Chrysler, Mr. Bodnar joined Control Data System’s Manufacturing/PDM division where he served as a sales engineer, product architect, and product manager for Control Data’s PDM solutions: EDL and Metaphase.

Mr. Bodnar later helped create Auxilium, Inc., a software company that pioneered the creation of composite web applications which connected to a variety of back-end systems, including most established ERP and mainframe solutions. After Auxilium’s acquisition by Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), Mr. Bodnar joined PTC as Director of Product Marketing for the Windchill solutions group. Mr. Bodnar later re-joined the Metaphase team after it had been acquired by Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (SDRC) as the Vice President of SDRC’s Collaborative Solutions Group. After SDRC’s acquisition by Electronic Data Systems, Mr. Bodnar joined MSC Software Corporation, a leading provider of structural, thermal and multi-body dynamics engineering analysis solutions, where he served as Vice President of Marketing and Product Management.

To learn more about Kenesto, download An Introduction to Kenesto at http://www.kenesto.com/intro.

About Kenesto
Kenesto (www.kenesto.com) is a cloud-based Social Process Management tool which empowers people and teams to automate business processes across the value chain. By automating day-to-day business processes such as issuing Requests for Quotes (RFQ), managing Engineering Change Requests (ECR), and generating quotes & bid proposals, Kenesto enables manufacturing, architectural, engineering, and construction companies to expedite responsiveness to customers, increase productivity of internal resources, and better manage supply chain partners.

Contact:
Stephen Bodnar
steve@kenesto.com

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My take:

I know that Kenesto has been looking to fill this slot for some time. While I have not yet spoken to Bodnar, it seems that the turmoil at Autodesk and the attraction of a startup run by Mike Payne were enough to convince him.

Bodnar’s role at Kenesto should enable Kenesto to reach the next level of success.

Readers might also want to read our previous blog on Kenesto.
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Kenesto: What is it?

December 18, 2011 By in Digital Prototyping, Manufacturing industry, PLM Industry Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

18 Dec 2011:  Just a few weeks ago Mike Payne, one of the founders of PTC, SolidWorks, and SpaceClaim, noted on his LinkedIn page that he was un-retired. I found this exciting enough to reach out to Mike to find out about his new company. As a result Mike Payne, Kenesto CEO since March of this year, hosted me earlier this week at their offices in Waltham, MA. He and some of his staff filled me in about the product and where it’s heading.

Basically, the product is the antithesis of Payne’s formerly complex products in the CAD arena. Aimed at the category called business process automation, this cloud-based application allows asynchronous spawning of processes. Different from similar systems that try to model processes, Kenesto builds processes on the fly. Users wanting to track a process they are initiating, for instance an ECO, initiate a process, attach documents to it, and add users to the next process by adding their email addresses. Different types of “next processes” can be defined, such as “review and approve.” At each step in the process the recipient can add additional processes that add steps to the overall process. Kenesto builds the process diagram as steps are added. Note that this differs significantly from the BPM (Business Process Modeling) approach that models processes using a cumbersome programmatic approach. Kenesto calls it Business Process Automation (BPA).

We spent a fair amount of time discussing security and about control of attached documents. Jerry Meyer, Kenesto’s chief product officer, explained that most documents  (CAD images, docs, pdf’s or other related files) could be made view only, limiting the need for most security. In addition, Meyer and Payne both emphasized that ideally Kenesto would point back to the primary data vault, which provides primary security for collaborative data sharing. Users would most likely, if needed, upload to Kenesto more concise files, such as JT.

Each user of the process can examine all of the process steps, and see who did what and the entire process status. Processes can complete, but are left in the system for inspection and review. This brings up many possibilities of additional value. Different than is done in most cases today, each Kenesto process contains value in that the steps are recorded as to who did what, when it was done, and the reasons for certain decisions. Imagine, as might be the case for an FEA analysis of a product during the design cycle, if you could record the various simulation alternatives and capture the alternative finally selected and the reasoning behind it. IMHO, this might be easier than the complex simulation capture and record systems being proposed by many CAE systems such as Simulia and Siemens’ PLM Software.

Product status: Kenesto is approaching their first Beta and will use this to refine their product and its UI. Right now the user interface appears to be very simple. Being cloud based, and storing little or no CAD data, implementation involves signing up for the product and picking some areas to begin using the system. Ideal areas would be those that require tracking of the process status.

Pricing is not yet available. Payne described that the company is searching for a pricing schema that encourages the use of the system rather than the alternative. Kenesto is building up its staff. Currently the company is small, with development in Israel.

I like the approach. Clearly the system is evolving rapidly. Not too different than Autodesk’s 360 Nexus approach, the idea of fitting in to the way organizations work rather than forcing each company into using “best practices” should simplify implementations. Most importantly, Kenesto enables tracking the flow of information across organizational boundaries and can insure that critical design and review steps are not lost in the day-to-day miasma of paperwork and deadlines.

You can find put a bit more at http://www.kenesto.com and download a paper describing generally describing the product.

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