Lily Snyder

In 2016 I took a role at a virtual reality start-up whose goal is to reduce the amount we have to travel for work by collaborating in VR. I think it is an exciting opportunity and it was time for me to try something new. As you know, I’ve posted many times about virtual teams and how to get work done when working remote so this company ties in quite nicely with that.

However, what I failed to realize in those posts is that the tools to successfully work in a virtual team were all wrong. Let me tell you, the right tool is virtual reality! This past week I went to Beijing, China as part of our Leadership Team to pitch our company to multiple venture capitalists who had formed a virtual reality fund. For the first time, I tried our product in virtual reality (I’ve been using the desktop version). It blew me away! I went from being in our host’s office to being in our VR work space. I was truly immersed. All the chaos of demos being set up and the murmur of teams practicing their presentations faded away as I navigated my virtual office.

Just because I took this new role doesn’t mean that my passion for MES has faded. On the contrary, my brain is running with ideas of how to incorporate MES with VR. I think about how much time can be saved testing MES and new line configurations in virtual reality before manually having to reconfigure the line on the plant floor. I think about how engineers can re-configure workflows and simulate new product lines to see where bottlenecks will form before implementing it. The possibilities for manufacturing are only going to grow as our technological tools evolve!

I am doing some MES consulting on the side and you will still see some MES related posts from time to time. I’m not sure exactly where this blog’s focus will go to next. Virtual reality, although growing rapidly (it’s expected to be a $20 billion market by 2020!) is still new so I will probably blog about how we can best use it in the enterprise. I will also continue to focus on making the best of distributed teams and remote workers.

Thank you for reading and let me know if you have any questions!