PDF
Key takeaways:
- The ENOVIA brand of Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCE platform has a comprehensive strategy and is making solid progress toward their vision with over 2,400 companies in production.
- Investments are being made across the lifecycle, including innovation planning and strategic sourcing and operations.
- Demonstrations showing multi-CAD integration with competitor's CAD tools, the No Magic systems engineering solution, and quality applications demonstrated progress toward connecting competitive systems into the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
- The support for Cloud continues to grow, and the strategy of migrating product development appears to be a good way to bring their installed base forward as identified in recent CIMdata research.
CIMdata attended the ENOVIA brand update held at Dassault Systèmes' North American headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts on September 27, 2017. This analyst-only event was hosted by the ENOVIA's executive team. The team gave a comprehensive update on ENOVIA and how the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is evolving to meet customer needs. Dassault Systèmes prides themselves as a "scientific" company that makes bets on specific technologies and builds a product strategy around them.
Mr. Keith Charron, VP of Sales, reviewed recent wins in the marketplace including the latest Boeing win. He claimed Dassault Systèmes is experiencing excellent growth of their 3DEXPERIENCE platform by noting that over 2,400 customers are on the platform, including over 200 large customers with more than 200 seats in production. While there are earlier releases of the V6 architecture in use, Dassault Systèmes considers 2013x and newer versions to be the platform-enabling releases. An interesting comment by Mr. Charron was that the biggest limit to adoption of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is the availability of implementation resources. Dassault Systèmes is using partners to address this issue. It's interesting that Dassault Systèmes is having the same issue that seems to be a general theme across industries, getting the right people is difficult.
Mr. Stephane Declee, CEO of the ENOVIA brand described his vision of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a business platform with a portfolio of business applications that can enable transformation from an enterprise-centric model to a value-centric model. Investments in the applications on the platform range from innovation planning at the beginning of the lifecycle through to the supply chain and operations. An example of this value-centric model is the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace which includes 3D supplier catalogs which help Dassault Systèmes end-users and component producers to exchange value-a critical capability CIMdata identifies within the Product Innovation Platform. CIMdata is looking forward to seeing how much traction Dassault Systèmes gets with this service.
Demonstrations showing multi-CAD integration with competitor's CAD tools, the recently acquired No Magic systems engineering solution, and quality applications showed how the technology is progressing to become a business platform able to support the heterogeneous reality of most enterprises. A key web service embedded in ENOVIA is the 3DPassport that enables Dassault Systèmes to quickly integrate enterprise level acquisitions such as Quintiq and Apriso.
The role-based apps and Netvibes dashboard approach shown for several authoring tools, including requirements management and change management, should ease 3DEXPERIENCE platform adoption. This is due to the simplified interaction that can be provided for solutions that are commonly difficult to use and by embedding applications like SOLIDWORKS and CATIA.
Dassault Systèmes organizes their applications by industry and role. They define 12 industries:
- Aerospace and Defense
- Architecture, Engineering & Construction
- Consumer Goods & Retail
- Consumer Packaged Goods & Retail
- Energy, Process & Utility
- Financial & Business Services
- High-Tech
- Industrial Equipment
- Life Sciences
- Marine & Offshore
- Natural Resources
- Transportation & Mobility
Within each industry they have defined Experiences which combine general and industry specific processes, as well as application configurations that include data models and embedded best practices. For example, the Aerospace and Defense industry includes the Product Planning and Programs experience, which supports a variety of roles such as Contract Deliverable Manager and Project Team Member. Given the broad range of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, this packaging strategy makes it much easier to configure and deploy a solution. Each industry has a suite of experiences and roles.
Their support for cloud continues to evolve. Dassault Systèmes' strategy is to support the full platform on the cloud. Given its breadth and depth, this is a big task. Dassault Systèmes chose to migrate product development roles first and it appears to be a good way to bring their installed base forward. Recent CIMdata research identified increased growth in the cloud. At this briefing, Dassault Systèmes announced that 24 of 51 product development roles had been cloud enabled. Overall the platform has more than 250 roles. CIMdata strongly supports this strategy and implementation direction.
While high-level strategy and enterprise level investments are critical, tangible improvements were demonstrated to support ENOVIA end users today. Enhancements to change management, BOM management, mobile, and multi-CAD support help improve productivity by making traceability and change impact analysis simpler and more intuitive to end users.
Figure 1-Community Connections Supported by Dassault Systèmes
A critical concept of a platform is that it is an ecosystem that enables the exchange of value between different communities of platform participants as shown in Figure 1. In addition to the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace noted above, Dassault Systèmes also described their new 3DEXPERIENCE Center within the Innovation Center at Wichita State University in Kansas. Its primary goals are to support prototyping new concepts, processes and methods, and educating the next generation aerospace workforce. Wichita is an aerospace center where many of the major manufacturers and suppliers have operations. The center includes 24 labs that will have access to the full 3DEXPERIENCE platform to support their projects that cover the full range of technical disciplines including material development, biology, structures, multi-physics simulation, 3D printing, augmented and virtual reality immersive capabilities, propulsion, Multiple Robotic Advanced Manufacturing (MRAM) cells, electronics, and software. CIMdata is looking forward to a future visit to the center and learning more about the center's research.
Summary
CIMdata is impressed with Dassault Systèmes' vision for their 3DEXPERIENCE platform and support for different communities. Dassault Systèmes has made many acquisitions over the years and has leveraged the technology and more importantly the people to expand from a 3D CAD tool focus to a product innovation platform. The recent business wins and platform adoption success shows that customers also understand how the platform can help digitalize their businesses. At the core of the platform, ENOVIA, a proven cPDm-enabling solution provides the technical data and process management as well as advanced security and the apps needed to plan and execute business strategies. The ENOVIA team has continued to expand the breadth of business areas covered, as shown by their innovation management supply chain initiatives, while continuing to improve core cPDm capabilities. CIMdata will be watching to see how Dassault Systèmes continues to expand and execute its product innovation platform vision.
