CIMdata's Vice President, Stan Przybylinski, recently sat down with Dassault Systèmes' Garth Coleman, ENOVIA VP Marketing, so that he could learn more about Dassault Systèmes' digitalization strategy.
Let's find out what Garth had to say!
First some context ... According to CIMdata’s global PLM market research, Dassault Systèmes is a global market leader in PLM. Their CATIA and SOLIDWORKS offerings lead their respective market segments, and global brands SIMULIA, DELMIA, and ENOVIA are also among the market leaders in their respective market segments.
How important is digitalization to the strategy of Dassault Systèmes?
Digitalization is a key strategic component for Dassault Systèmes. We believe that the virtual world extends and improves the real world, and our vision is to connect product, nature, and life at every level, from the microscopic for medical and materials applications all the way to the macro, modeling cities and regions, all with a high degree of fidelity to the real world. Digitalization is fundamental to realizing this vision.
We created the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to unite every organization in a company around a single digital environment. Having everything from 3D design to analysis, modeling, simulation, manufacturing, marketing, operations, and business intelligence – centralized into a single, modern interface – enables unparalleled efficiency in the value creation process and the creation of differentiating consumer experiences.
Our concept of the 3DEXPERIENCE Twin is a powerful example of this approach. It is so much more than a centralized, digital repository of 3D design information and manufacturing information. It is the full digital product and process definition, including the requirements, the configuration options, the system behaviors, the materials, the virtual simulations, the production plan, and even the marketing assets. All of which can be simulated and optimized, holistically and virtually, so the “virtual” extends and improves the “real.” It allows for rapid iteration and evolution, and creates very mature products, even while still in development.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform lets you take the massive, big data information from the real-world and use it as inputs to help formulate new hypotheses and then test them using the 3DEXPERIENCE Twin. In this way, the “real” comes back to enrich the “virtual.” This cycle of enrichment supports continuous improvement, bringing a DevOps approach to physical products.
To keep all of these activities focused on achieving sustainable business results, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables companies to securely collaborate and innovate together to build and execute a successful plan – one that is flexible, allowing continuous optimization, real-time progress tracking, and compliance with standards and regulations. All of this removes boundaries so companies can grow and experience their knowledge and know how, and focus their efforts on transforming market opportunities into marketplace advantages.
Through virtual experiences, augmented reality, and realistic simulation, digital technology revolutionizes our relationship with knowledge, just like the printing press did with books in the 15th century. Today the new book is the virtual experience that adds knowledge and know-how, while eliminating the gap between experimentation and learning. As a result, a real Industry Renaissance is emerging worldwide. Combining the real and the virtual leads to new ways of seeing the world, of inventing, learning, producing, and doing business. It creates new ways for industries and technologies to interact. New categories of industrial companies are creating new categories of solutions for new categories of customers. What we are seeing, therefore, is not Industry 4.0 trying to digitalize 20th century industry, but the need to invent the industry of the 21st century. And the 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables companies to access and apply knowledge and know-how at hyper-speed, harnessing this digital transformation to enhance all sectors of society with new ways, both real and virtual, of inventing, learning, producing, and trading.
What about the ecosystem of infrastructure, applications and other partners that are part of your offerings?
Having this ecosystem is core to delivering our value. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is organized around specific business roles and their individual user needs. We’ve created robust applications around these roles to enable teams of users to work efficiently – and securely – all within the same unified data set. This not only values up the existing business, but empowers everyone in the company to become business innovators and find new possibilities to explore.
Taking this a step further, when companies pursue such a broad digital transformation strategy, they rely on the many Dassault Systèmes services partners who offer comprehensive business, solution, and technology consulting services. This includes our partners that focus on the operational components of installation and training.
Our solutions are increasingly available on the cloud and we have numerous certified cloud infrastructure partners to meet the needs of our global customer base. Dassault Systèmes' cloud operations team works very closely with our cloud infrastructure partners to provide a turnkey and reliable experience to our customers. Users only need to focus creating and delivering value, and not worry about maintaining servers, security patches, or upgrades.
Of course, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform extends well beyond product development. We have the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace, an online, qualified ecosystem of worldwide industrial suppliers. Two services are available here: 3DEXPERIENCE Make and 3DEXPERIENCE Part Supply. With over 180 qualified services providers and more than 13,000 manufacturing machines, 3DEXPERIENCE Make simplifies the process for manufacturing on demand. Users simply upload designs, choose a manufacturer, and receive their parts – with all quotes, transactions, and payments made through the Marketplace.
3DEXPERIENCE Part Supply is the most comprehensive and intelligent catalog of sourceable 3D components. It offers 700+ qualified content providers from over 30 countries providing more than 30 million qualified component configurations, from mechanics, to fluid systems, electrical engineering, manufacturing, and more.
How does your solution and its go-to-market address the issues raised by your customers and prospects?
Here are four common issues raised by customers and prospects:
- Where to begin the journey.
- How to gain – or maintain – market share.
- How to manage growing complexity with ever-increasing consumer demands.
- How to deal with ever-changing certification and regulatory processes.
So where do you start when it comes to digitalizing product, nature, and life? Naturally, it depends on a company’s immediate needs, their current state, and what they’re targeting for the future. The great thing is that it isn’t so important where a company chooses to begin, because the 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps to “future proof” their business.
For example, some customers just want to get a handle on their CAD data. They can start there and easily grow into other roles and applications as they go. Companies can therefore choose to focus on the areas that bring the greatest initial return on investment. With our completely integrated, holistic, and multi-discipline digital architecture, it is easy turn on new roles when needed to support changing processes and priorities.
Dassault Systèmes focuses on 11 defined industries – with our industry leaders identifying and addressing the key challenges for their respective industries. For example, in the aerospace and defense industry, a lot of disruptive technology comes from agile start-ups that aren’t burdened with having to support outdated technology and processes. To keep pace, established players must transform how they innovate, or risk being overtaken.
To rapidly deliver individualized products requires companies to develop modular components that can be configured to meet customer requirements. As a result, product modularity is a great example of an interest shared across many industries. This is one reason Dassault Systèmes has invested to improve our advanced variant configuration management capabilities, that extends throughout our 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Product managers define a set of options, and their interrelationships, and these options are then used to build new configurations by product architects, which become available to designers and engineers for continuous product development and manufacturing release.
Finally, constant evolution in the product development process, increasing consumer demands, and changing regulations have all made certification ever more complex. Missing a product launch window due to a certification delay can kill a program. Today, the certification process is fragmented and lacks a single source of truth spanning multiple departments, authorities, and operators. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform eliminates these silos and our customers are seeing great success in leveraging digital data for certification.
Can you provide any Information on your digitalization/digital transformation efforts: how many customers, their industries, etc.?
We’ve been seeing double-digit growth in the ENOVIA brand, which is strong evidence of the increasing need for digital transformation across all industries. We have over 4,500 customers on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, with about 80% of our growth coming from mid-market companies. We have seen almost triple-digit growth of cloud customers and this pace is accelerating. Our POWER’BY strategy makes the 3DEXPERIENCE platform more inclusive and accessible, allowing customers to keep their existing CAD tools while capitalizing on the incredible value of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
How are your offerings going to evolve in the short to medium term (1-3 years)?
ENOVIA always looks to support new value-based processes that speed time-to-value for our mid-market customers. In support of our POWER’BY strategy, we will continue to deliver enhanced capabilities for connecting MCAD and ECAD applications. This advances the multi-disciplinary capabilities in multi-MCAD scenarios, as well as provides new methodologies for MCAD-ECAD collaboration.
Speaking of CAD, our cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE.WORKS offering for the SOLIDWORKS user community natively brings the power of our 3DEXPERIENCE platform roles and applications into the mainstream market.
We are continuously building out additional business modeling and planning capabilities, including new functionalities in portfolio modeling, project management, sourcing, total quality management, and business innovation. This includes reinventing our sourcing capabilities to best leverage our cloud platform and marketplace.
Dassault Systèmes also continues to make strategic investments in transformative technologies and processes. Recent acquisitions, most notably Medidata for $5.8 billion, reinforce our position as a provider of an end-to-end approach to research and development in the Life Sciences industry. This expands our existing industry offering from digital design and simulation, into the field of clinical development so new life-saving treatments can be brought to the public.
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We look forward to hearing from you!
Stan
