I attended the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum 2017 earlier this month in Hollywood, Florida. As always, the event provided a deep insight into the direction Dassault Systèmes (DS) is going. We always enjoy the opportunity to meet with various DS representatives and customers to exchange ideas on our experiences using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Here are some of the highlights I found to be important.

BioModex, the Living Heart Project, and Cloud Capabilities

The presentations by BioModex Co-Founding CEO and Chairman Thomas Marchand and the Living Heart Project were inspiring. DS President Bernard Charles’ vision of harmonizing nature, product and life is becoming a reality. DS also used the opportunity to promote its cloud capabilities, in this case, supporting startup and research companies which are using high performance simulations.

3DEXPERIENCE Updates from Dassault

The session led by Xavier Belamy from DS (industrial equipment) was very informative. It covered the 3DEXPERIENCE Powered By solution, from idealization to requirements management, through functional, logical and physical aspects (system engineering). It reflected the way DS ties this process to the digital twin concept. The solution, in addition to supporting CATIA, will be supporting SolidWorks and multi-CAD later in 2018. The industrial equipment solutions also addressed contemporary engineering challenges like using more electronics and the need to support customers’ specific requirements (no more mass production of the same product). In this “powered-by” approach, everything is connected.

User Insights

The user conference on Thursday was impressive. ENOVIA VP of Sales and Operations Keith Charron made an interesting comparison between a disruptive platform like Amazon in the retail market a few years ago and DS being a disruptive player in the “makers” market. He mentioned the diversification across more industries and business solutions. He also discussed a few recent big wins for DS in the automotive and aerospace industries, where it replaced a competitor’s product. The message was all about the 3DEXPERIENCE Powered By platform getting traction in the manufacturing market.

Customer Success Stories from the Field

Greg Brock from GE Power and Matt Rose from Eaton had good presentations summarizing their challenges managing multiple divisions in the organization. Matt Rose described how Eaton is a company that is growing by acquisitions, and discussed how it needs to manage different CAD systems, ERP systems and processes across the organization. While Eaton is live using the system, Greg Brock described how GE is still piloting 3DEXPERIENCE, but has made significant headway so far taking advantage of 3DEXPERIENCE Powered By to better deal with globalization and convergence.

More About 3DEXPERIENCE Powered By

ENOVIA’s Product Portfolio Leader, Kevin Baughy, gave a solid review of the 3DEXPERIENCE Powered By and its direction. He reviewed the following topics:

·       The process of improved CAD and BOM management

·       Requirements management with the ability to consume and update data

·       New apps and widgets

·       Planning and governance model

·       Project management

·       Collaborative tasks (introduced in the platform in 2017x independent of the project management module)

·       Change management native and widget access as a single configuration change framework

Toward the end of his presentation, he demonstrated 3DMerchandising, which provides a visual consumer experience. He described how search within 3DEXPERIENCE is now based on a uniform experience (i.e., the same user experience on web, mobile and native apps).

Fostering Innovation

ENOVIA’s VP of Marketing Garth Colman gave two presentations at the user’s conference. The first was about the 3DEXPERIENCE Powered By solution. Garth mentioned how the system fosters innovation by providing solutions for all disciplines in the manufacturing process. He explained the difference between digitizing data where documents are still considered digital data, vs. a digitalized environment where all data is in electronic form and is not document based. He spoke about the system agility – today’s market is for individual unique experiences in an experience world – with no more mass production of the same product but mass production of different customized products configured to meet users’ custom requirements. It is much harder to stay competitive in such a demanding world but 3DEXPERIENCE has the tools to support this process. He described simulation and visualization along with system engineering and multi-CAD. He mentioned that 3DEXPERIENCE can offer a “take what you want/need when you want to” approach. For example, you can start using project management within 3DEXPERIENCE, and still manage your data and only move your legacy data into the platform when you need to because the solution can be configured to allow this.

Quality Management Improvements

Another interesting presentation by ENOVIA’s Quality Strategy Director Barry Foster focused on the improvement in quality management and quality document control management. The list of improvements and additional functionality added over the last few years is massive. Barry reviewed:

·       Document control and change management functionality, including templates, red-lining and electronic signatures.

·       The ability to drive standard behavior for CAPA.

·       Implementation plans for supporting the planning and execution of a fix.

·       The effectiveness check to periodically validate the fix.

·       CAPA and audits based on the project management framework in 3DEXPERIENCE 2017X.

·       Fully matured DHF and DMR solutions for the medical device design.

·       Adverse event added to the quality module to report product failure related events.

In addition, he introduced regulatory affairs management.

Cloud Options

Garth Coleman’s second presentation was about the cloud. Garth highlighted the different cloud options of SaaS, cloud as infrastructure, (e.g., Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) and private cloud. He emphasized how SaaS is best for performance and ease of IT maintenance, but mentioned that, so far, mainly smaller and lab companies are the main subscribers. He also mentioned that DS is pushing hard in that direction and that some future functions will only be supported in the cloud and not on-premise. One of the limitations of the cloud is due to its multi-tenant architecture which doesn’t allow customization for security breaching reasons. However, DS will add some of the currently missing applications and integration to the cloud in the future to better mimic the on-premise experience today.

Read more about xLM Solutions and its expertise with Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE PLM software.

What were your takeaways from the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum?

 

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