Rediscover home…

I plan my holiday to reconnect with my family in Paris taking advantage of several public holidays in the month of May, starting with May 1st which is labor day in many countries, followed by May 7th in Buddhist countries and May 8th in France. Unfortunately, I have to cancel this trip due to Covid-19. I’m wondering how fast I can get a refund for the ticket.

No other choice for me then staying home, my other home, in Singapore. I have been calling Singapore home for more than 20 years.

We all work from home for more than a month. And we continue to work from home until June 1st. I believe that working from home will become something not uncommon in the next 12 to 18 months at least.

Honestly, how much do you know about your home?

We spend almost 10 hours in the office every day. We see our colleagues every day more than we talk to our spouse and our kids. 

Confined at home, I start to cook more, have my own food and somehow admire my cooking skill. I’m not kidding, I can cook.

I don’t venture out far away from my place. I shop at the nearby supermarket. I walk to the neighborhood to get my mangoes and watermelon. I drive to a nearby butcher shop to get my meat. I go back to my memories, searching for the taste of food that my mum and my grandmother used to prepare for us on Sunday. I try to replicate my wife’s recipe. I alternate between french and vietnamese cuisine. 

I spend a lot of time in the morning for breakfast. With the door leading to the balcony wide open, I listen to bird chirping, to cicadas singing instead of noise pollution from cars and trains. I don’t hear many airplanes landing and taking off despite the fact that I’m only 5 minutes away from Changi airport. I live with nature in my home. When you think that Singapore has an urbanization rate at 100%. Confinement brings to you not only inconvenience but gives you back many aspects of life that you have forgotten. 

I have online calls with my colleagues and partners every day in my tiny study room. When I turn on my camera, then I realize how messy my home is. I start rearranging my study room and within a minute, I become another version of Marie Kondo.

This is the moment that I bring out the old photos, Or should I say, rediscovering the memories. I scan them and share with my children and my wife, through Facebook with friends and relatives. I save the scanned photos on Flickr, it keeps the original quality better than Facebook. From an engineer perspective, I’m using a modern subscription photo editing tool with cloud technology to preserve and share my past memories. 

All right, after the cleaning, my so-called home office has a nice white background which I can use for video calls and also for video shooting.

On the other hand, not being in office doesn't stop me from talking with colleagues and partners. Professionally, I keep engaging with them on 3DEXPERIENCE. 

Just like my study room (and my house as well), I started cleaning up my Dashboard on 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. I want people to see my clean and neat dashboard when I share my screen during the video calls. Dashboard with only minimum but necessary information.

I want my table to get updated easily. So I spent an hour deep diving into the latest version of DataGrip. By the way, we just upgraded our 3DEXPERIENCE platform. We are now running R2021x. The beauty of cloud software (or SaaS), is that you as a user, don’t need to spend too much on re-installing, downloading and installing new versions every 6 weeks to 2 months. The entire upgrading operation runs on Saturday when I was cycling from home to Marina Bay downtown and back to home again. 

My mind is going back to my memory lanes while I’m using the latest technology offered, to revive, share and preserve these unforgettable moments. 

In the meantime, with social distancing in real life, I keep connecting digitally with my family and friends via FaceTime or WhatsApp and getting in touch (also collaborating) with colleagues and partners through various tools like Skype, GotoMeeting and essentially 3DEXPERIENCE platform with popular roles like Collaborative Business Innovator and apps like 3DSwym, 3DDrive and MyShares. We share the same Dashboard but I have my own Dashboard for daily tasks.

Rediscovering home makes you feel alive and you would realize that confinement has the good side.

And then, don’t be afraid of technology, it helps you to preserve legacy while letting you embrace innovation. 

After tomorrow...

I’m not always positive. I’m optimistic.
I’m going to die one day but not tomorrow.
I strongly believe that humanity will survive the covid-19, and the next pandemic. I’m so sure that life after-covid-19 will be different. Will it be better? It depends on how we change to survive the covid-19.
I haven’t seen the whole team of 20 plus colleagues together since the end of February. And for the last 2 weeks, I see none of them. But I’m engaging with them almost daily, sometimes twice or thrice per day. We even manage to run workshops and training with 3 facilitators, each working from home. We also create digital contents for training purposes, with my camera and lighting setup in my tiny study room at home. My productivity is improving while I start to re-adjust my habits, coffee time and lunch time, with exercise time to keep fit.
What the after-covid-19 looks like? How do I see the future?
Saint Exupéry, famous French writer used to say:
"Pour ce qui est de l'avenir il ne s'agit pas de le prévoir, mais de le rendre possible"
Translating in English, it would be:
"As for the future, it is not a question of foreseeing it, but of making it possible"
Our customers are mostly companies that produce machinery and industry equipment, medical devices, oil and gas equipment, consumer products. On the production perspective, you can’t work from home for sure. We might add more robots, we might automate more.
That means we produce more robots. Labour shifts from final products to small and big robot, automated assembly lines.
Engineering team can definitively work from home. If engineers need to be working in one single location, they may be split into shift or alternate working day to avoid cross contamination. Engineers will leverage on connectivity to existing IT infrastructure. Companies may find that it would be better to move IT resources to cloud services providers.
From an IT equipment perspective, if engineers are working from home and if they are facing hardware failure, that means IT vendors need to have a strong and capable mobile services staff to engage with end-users at their home. Cost will certainly increase drastically. No, it’s not going to work.
Unless, engineers access software and storage on the cloud completely with just a browser. That means, engineers will only have a minimum equipment, not a high-end desktop or laptop, something easy to maintain, easy to replace. And temporary while waiting for replacement, engineers can use existing home-use equipment, or even their smart television set.
Software of the cloud
Storage on the cloud
Communication through internet (Phone landline is dead, phone call on mobile is also dead, smartphone via 4G/5G is King)
I need a platform like Facebook or WhatsApp to collaborate with my colleagues, but instead of a photo of the dish that I cook and eat (that’s true, we will dine out less often), I’m sharing notes, presentation, idea, 3D parts, simulation results. I want to use good project planning tools with my team members and partners.
3DEXPERIENCE has all the requirements that I need. It’s a platform with apps that I need, storage place for my documents, space to collaborate that can host 3D data, PDF, documents with revision control, approval process. And community, either public or private or secret, to share ideas, to post activity. It has a project planning tool, intuitive and easy to use. It can be used out-of-the-box, no installation or implementation. It connects with my existing SOLIDWORKS desktop. It brings my existing parts and assemblies to the cloud so I can start sharing and working with my team members.
Since I commute less to the office, I might think of selling my car and cycling to the office when the confinement is over (or Circuit Breaker as we call it in Singapore).
With the covid-19 situation, the sky is clearer, the atmosphere is cleaner, pollution is lower.
Only recently that I can hear birds chirping over the balcony, a very quiet environment with less cars on the road, less people on the train and bus. People queue up within a certain distance. 
Working from home with the internet and cloud platforms like 3DEXPERIENCE, we will certainly make the world a better place for our next generation.
That’s why I believe I’m optimistic.

How can we get through this COVID-19?

We are facing a very challenging situation. I don’t know what to call it.
Is it a financial crisis? Not really because we intentionally decide to halt all tradings and economic activities.
Is it a war? Maybe it’s a war. But the whole world is on one front. The other front is invisible. We got hit without knowing it until we fell sick. We don’t see and hear explosions and we have nowhere to hide, other than putting our face behind a surgical mask.
The World Health Organisation calls it pandemic. It’s due to a coronavirus or covid-19.
It’s an unusual situation.
I have seen this kind of crisis a few times in my sixty years living on this planet.
The first crisis that I witnessed was in 1972 in Vietnam, where I was born. My father’s hair turned from black to grey and white within 6 months. And he started thinking of bringing the family to Canada.
My father's factory produced a well known satin fabric in Saigon at that time. It was Nam A satin. Black and white satin were very popular among the vietnamese ladies and girls. It was a companion of the traditional “áo dài”. During the spring 1972, the nord army took some key positions in the south during the Vietnamese war. Every one panicked. The South government lost territories piece by piece. My father's business came to stand still, not a single cent of revenue for 6 months. Following the peace treaty in Paris in 1973, business was back to normal. My father’s factory started making fabric for western costume with technology and machinery imported from Japan. Black and white satin fabric were produced but it wasn’t the only product. And he and his textile business survived until April 1975.
Back to a more modern day, taxis were less popular because drivers didn’t want to change the way they treat customers. HBO, Cinemax, and other cable television providers were still happy with the dominant position and didn’t see Netflix and Amazon coming. These businesses lost revenue and customers because they were too comfortable with the customers based and the way they provided services and value. It’s not about technology. They could have the same technology like everybody else. They didn’t see smart and connected devices. People don’t just stay home and watch content on their television set.
Now that I’m confined at home. My company informed me this morning that the access to the office has been canceled. They don’t want to get fined by the Singaporean government. Singapore is well known as the city of fines.
I’m stuck at home with my laptop, my iPhone, my beautiful 4K screen which I share with my Mac Mini, my Jabra speaker which I use to talk to my colleagues, my partners and my customers.
I check my email twice a day. And to be honest, I hate email because it can carry “viruses” along. Not the same type of virus though.
I start working and collaborating with others using Skype, GotoMeeting, GotoTraining, Google and more importantly 3DEXPERIENCE. Those tools are cloud platforms.
My engagement with most of my partners is through cloud platforms (iOS, Google and 3DEXPERIENCE). I don’t save most of my stuff on a local hard disk. It’s on the cloud now.
Think about it. Few years ago, when I needed to work on some information and data. First, I put them on a single file that I attached to an email and sent to my partners in order to get their input and feedback. They both replied to me in one or 2 days with an update set of data and more information in 1 document. I mean, each of them in one document. How could I cope with the consolidation? That was another full day of work.
Today, we collaborate and work on the same and unique document shared among us, on the cloud.
Accessing the information stored on cloud platforms, allows you to work in any circumstance, on any device, anywhere as long as I can access to the internet.
Engaging with customers through a private cloud platform can guarantee that all stakeholders share the same and unique information, avoiding all misunderstanding which may delay a project or a deal. This is the technology that I’m using during this pandemic period and I will certainly continue to use it when we get back to normal.
How can we get through this pandemic? Or how can we change to get through this difficult situation.
I can’t wait to see Kim’s Convenience series on Netflix after my dinner.