Automotive Design and Production

FEB 2014

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AD&P; > February 2014 > FEATURE > Dassault Goes to the Cloud > Lawrence S. Gould > lsg@lsgould.com by Lawrence S. Gould > Contributing Editor "You don't learn with static products. You learn from experience," says Bernard Charles, member of the board, president, and CEO of Dassault Systèmes (3ds.com). His comment neatly encapsulates the direction Dassault is taking with its stable of software. "The frst time I came to Detroit," says Olivier Sappin, Dassault's vice president of transportation and mobility industry, "the only topics were how to shrink time-to-market and develop products quicker. Back then, [automakers] needed so much time, they could not compete with the Japanese. Everything else was second priority. [American automakers] have fxed that. Now they can spend time on the other challenges they face." Take mechatronics, for example, products that combine mechanical, electrical, and electronic systems. Up to a point, continues Sappin, "people could manage the architecture of a system on a piece of paper because it was so simple. That's impossible now." Individuals, even small teams of engineers, need integrated, multi-domain, automated tools to develop mechatronic products. 34 The mechatronics example brings up another aspect of "experience" that should not be ignored. Think "beyond PLM." Sure, says Charles, PLM addresses the way we build, design, produce, and maintain products, but "do you think PLM in its current scope can see the other side: How the owner of the car experiences the car? Do you think the owner of the car cares about how the car was made?" Therein is why Dassault V6 brings simulation and visualization up front and center. "If you give an electronic job to a mechanical engineer, the odds are very high he won't understand it," says Charles. "But if you show him the experience, he understands it immediately. When that experience is presented in a truly cooperative, multi-discipline environment, people understand each other." Dassault is also morphing Version 6 Release 2014 (V6R2014)—its integrated design, engineering, manufacturing, and PLM software—into cloud applications that act as a single business-experience platform: "the 3DExperience platform." Michel Tellier, Dassault's vice president for the Aerospace & Defense (A&D;) Industry, points out that "up to now, Dassault has been building the `user experience' versus the 'enterprise experience.' Now we're building the `industry solution experience.'" (That applies to A&D; as well as automotive.) "Catia is not a platform for actually deciding the detailed design of a system. It's a platform for defning product as a system. The Catia system is a common language, a model of how all these systems integrate and behave together." V6R2014 will still be available in the conventional way—on-premise, on the user-company's IT systems—but it will also be available on public and private clouds. Of course, cloud operations might not be for everyone. Explains Sappin, automotive OEMs today rely on very large, legacy systems running on on-site IT. "I would not say that these guys would not change one day, but for them to change from on-premises systems to a cloud-based solution would be a revolution. Our frst goal is to bring a simple, out-of-the-box system to plenty of customers."

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