Qualis Corporation’s, Roger Herdy, to Keynote at PLM Road Map™ 2009

Riverside CT – Collaborative Product Development Associates (CPDA), a provider of critical analyses for PLM decisions, announces that Roger Herdy, Program Manager and Director for Strategic Business Development at Qualis Corporation will join Siemens PLM Software’s Chuck Grindstaff, Pendaran Inc.’s Dr. Hossein Nivi, General Motor’s John L. Givens Jr., IMVP’s Glenn Mercer, and Mentor Graphic’s Dr. Walden Rhines as a keynote speaker at its annual PLM Road Map™ conference, to be held at The Inn at St. John's, outside of Detroit, Michigan on September 22 and 23.

Planning for space logistics campaigns is paramount for success, and more often than not the central approach employed by most organizations heralds back to Gantt and PERT charts. For the new era of human space exploration, new tools must surpass the existing Gantt and PERT chart approaches to support the transition from the Space Shuttle to Constellation, while simultaneously balancing potential changes in priorities. The concept model to convey information quickly and efficiently to the vast workforce needed to successfully conduct and orchestrate a space logistics campaign plan and simulate this plan down to the level of a limited task cannot be fulfilled by Gantt and PERT charts alone.

Qualis Corporation has demonstrated at NASA that a new tool, Vdot™ as COTS software, can and will revolutionize space logistics, campaign planning, and simulation. Representative areas include the servicing and sustainment of the International Space Station and a future lunar outpost, the optimization of future launch vehicles for responsiveness and serviceability, and the broader modeling of manned and unmanned missions and campaigns as a supply chain in space.

In his keynote presentation, A Paradigm Shift in Process Information Flow at NASA, Roger Herdy will describe the various advantages Vdot™ offers to NASA and the aerospace industry in general. Specifically, he will share the benefits of uploading directly into Vdot™ a comprehensive project schedule compiled in Microsoft Project. The approach transforms the way NASA looks at schedules for the current multi-billion dollar Constellation Program. A paradigm shift in thinking about process information flow with Vdot™ shifts the focus to a complete methodology for accomplishing the space campaign planning and the simulation of the various process threads. The approach contrasts dramatically with the limiting views of task flows with the old Gantt or PERT tools in support of a much more thorough and intrinsically beneficial result. Overall, the process threads lead to the most efficient outcome, and generate an extremely useful and resource efficient approach.

Now in its 16th year, PLM Road Map™ 2009 is a strategic conference focused on the critical tradeoffs that shape product development. PLM Road Map™ 2009 will enable attendees to explore first hand the progress, opportunities, and roadblocks leading-edge end-users are confronting.

More information and updates on PLM Road Map™ 2009 may be found at http://www.cpd-associates.com/index.cfm?content=include_conference09.cfm .

Roger Herdy started his career at the Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Center, where he worked in the Special Projects group. He then joined the contractor community at NASA MSFC, where he managed the design and development of several test facilities, including the Solid Rocket Motor Air Flow Test Equipment, the Turbine Test Equipment, and the Nozzle Test Facility. He has also managed diverse programs such as the Otis Elevator Everest Project, which for the first time combined horizontal and vertical movement in a man-rated elevator system; he wrote the first project plan on the X-43 Hyper X scramjet demonstration program; and managed a program for the Missile Defense Agency where a F-16 class size unmanned supersonic target launcher was conceptualized. He holds two patents in propulsion, and has a joint patent with NASA MSFC pending in the area of advanced oxidizers.

Currently the Program Manager for Qualis Corporation on the NASA MSFC Engineering, Science and Technical Services contract, Roger focuses on cooperation and coordination for the development of the launch systems for NASA’s Constellation Program.