Who am I and what is PDM?

This is a picture of me. I am born in Oslo, Norway, January 10 1936. 

My mother, Aasta Dagny Isene, was from just outside Oslo (Stabekk) where her father, Ola St. Isene and his large family (11 children) had a large log house. My father, Einar Marelius Danielsen, was from way up north in Finnmark. He was born and grew up with his 4 brothers and a sister on a small island, Loppa, far out in the Arctic Sea. He moved to Oslo in his youth and was educated as a deacon. I had a very happy childhood.

After 10 years at school I went to sea in the merchant marine as a sailor. It did not last as long as I had expected, only about 7 months. The ship on which I was hired was a 10.000 ton cargo vessel, "Black Tern", transporting goods of all kind between European harbors (Rotterdam, Hamburg, Bremen and Antwerp) and North American harbors (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk and Newport News). It made me grow as a person but I also became aware of the fact that I was not cut out to be a sailor.

After that I enlisted in the Norwegian Air Force and was educated as an aircraft mechanic on F84 "Thunderjet" and F86K "Sabre". I stayed in the Norwegian Air Force for almost three years. I started my education at Göteborgs Tekniska Institut (GTI) at 20 years of age to become an Engineer with engines and automotive technique as specialty. In May 1958 I graduated and in September the same year I started at Volvo as a Design Engineer at the Truck Design Office.

I worked on a number of projects in various positions within Product Engineering of Trucks and Busses until fall 1968. After three months in the Middle East 1967, I became involved in the development of a computerized system for Parts Lists. KD69 (KonstruktionsData) was installed in 1969 and it took a few years before all Volvo vehicles were updated in this new system (through lots of manual labor). The project was in fact the only implemented part of the enormous VIS Project (Volvo Information System).

KDP (Konstruktionsdata PV) at Volvo Cars and KOLA (Konstruktion Lastvagnar) at Volvo Trucks and Volvo Bus and Z630 at Penta have later replaced KD69.

In 1973 I had an offer to move to France to participate in a joint venture project between four truck manufactures, Volvo, DAF, Saviem (today Renault, RVI) and Magirus (today part of IVECO). It was set up as a separate enterprise: European Truck Development, ETD. We started at the Saviem offices in Nauphle-le-Chateau but mowed later to a separate office in Le Chesnay - Parly2. I worked at various positions such as Product Planning, Product Documentation (not computerized) and Standards etc. In the beginning of 1975 I was offered a position at the newly established Product Development Office in Gent, Belgium, as responsible for their Technical Administration including Product Documentation, Change Management, Standards, Competence Development, Technical Computing etc.

While living in France we got our first son, Christopher. He was born in the end of May in Versailles. Our second son, Mattias, was born in Gent. He missed my fortieth birthday by two days only. These gyus have been of great joy to me and my wife. They have now left home to get educated and jobs elsewhere.

In October 1978 we mowed again. This time I was offered a position as responsible for "Administrative Development" within Product Development at Volvo BM in Eskilstuna. A few months later, the PROST (Product Structures) Project was under way part of a larger Project, MP80. In March 1982 the first part of this PDM (Product Documentation Management) System was installed and in May 1984 the last installation was done including a mechanized conversion of data from old files to the new databases. Since then PROST has been under constant development in order to cope with the dramatic changes Volvo BM has gone through:

During this transition I have been responsible for and participating in

The CAD support was separated organizationally from the PDM application development and maintenance organization some 6 years ago. The organization responsible for these functions had been belonging to Product Development since they were born but was transferred and merged with the company IT/IS organization. I have never been very interested in budgets and politics and when I resigned as responsible for a group of people, I concentrated on solving problems and using my experience and visionary capacity on things that interested me.

In June 1995 I participated in the start-up of a joint Volvo Group PDM Project. I was part of that project untill November 1998 when I chose not to move to Gothenburg and not to be be employed by the project.  Instead I took on the responsibility for the IT part of the VCE ESW Project. ESW is an acronym for "Embedded SoftWare" as a denomination for the programmable electronocs in the machines manufactured by VCE.  The project encompasses the "Back-office" applications serving the tools used to load the software into the ECU (Electronic Control Unit) in the machines at the plant when built and the tool used to service the machines out in the field.  It was an interesting project encompassing the three mega-processes Product Development, Order-to-Delivery and Sale-to-Repurchase. It will affect all Volvo CE Products and Product Companies using the tools mentioned. This was a project that suited me!

In 1983 we changed our familyname from Danielsen to Isene and my sons and I became Swedish citizens.

From January 1, 2000 I entered the status as "Retired" from Volvo.  I have started a business of my own: 
ISENE PDM Projections. 
I'm open to sugestions and may accept shorter or longer assignments if these are interesting to me an if they are some kind of a challenge.

Further information on http://www.isene.se 

Please study my presentation of of how I think PDM should be perceived in an Extended Enterprise with diversified and complex Products developed and manufactured around the world. 

Last update: 2001-03-08 EI