PLM and online collaboration

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Manufacturing

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PLM and online collaboration

22 March 2008

Bernard Charlès of Dassault Systèmes the effects online collaboration and new 3D lifelike experiences will have on the next wave of PLM solutions.

For over 26 years, we have been using the power of 3D to help our customers create, optimise and produce great products. We call this product lifecycle management (PLM). Today, we are entering a new era: the era of PLM 2.0.

PLM 2.0 is to PLM what Web 2.0 is to the Web, harnessing collective intelligence from online communities who can connect to each other and share ideas. Through the lifelike experience it provides, PLM 2.0 adds multiple dimensions to the world of innovation: a social dimension, with stakeholder communities collaborating online in 3D real-time, and a realistic dimension, with the laws of physics, for example, seamlessly embedded within the PLM 2.0 platform. In this sense, PLM 2.0 opens the door to the world we imagine, while enabling compliancy with the real world.

With realistic 3D, anyone can navigate through a product’s end-to-end lifecycle. The boundaries of space and time disappear. Through PLM 2.0’s realistic 3D, anyone connected can discover, learn, understand and contribute to the product lifecycle process at her own pace and from her unique perspective (in other words, what will she want to do with the product once produced). As we see with Web 2.0, the power of open online collaboration equates to exponentially more interesting innovations.

This new PLM environment enables user communities to take advantage of online 3D applications in order to imagine, share, and even ‘experience’ the future lives of products under construction. PLM 2.0 helps users bring product-related knowledge, from ideas to product experiences, to life. It merges the real and virtual in an immersive lifelike experience, interpreted by the universal language of 3D.

This strategy of ‘PLM online for all’ has been made possible thanks to our new V6 platform for global creation and collaboration online, available to anybody anywhere, spanning engineering groups, business and end users. This truly open platform embraces SOA standards and can be rapidly deployed. I envision that it will engender the development of never-before-thought-of applications that will seamlessly interweave with today’s applications, and just as easily be used by diverse user communities.

V6 creates a breakthrough to the value PLM brings businesses and individuals. The shift from traditional to online PLM applications is significant. We will see how the market adopts to this new thought leadership during the course of 2008. Our first V6 customers are truly excited by the platform’s intuitive user interface, the user experience it provides, the way it facilitates collaboration and working together concurrently in 3D real-time via a simple Web connection.

Anybody, from designers, to supply chain partners to end customers can now easily participate in the PLM process. This improves our customers’ ability to innovate rapidly and efficiently. We are blazing the trail for this market transformation and radically changing the PLM game.

Dassault Systèmes’ 3D virtual world, through the lifelike experiences it creates, is a very powerful environment for the entire product development process, from design to manufacturing to selling. Using the universal language of 3D, it helps everyone linked to the process to quickly identify technical dead-ends and redeploy their energies and ideas in the right direction. For companies, this results in better industrial performance and a sharper competitive edge. Our 3D solutions reflect the real world so accurately that our customers can almost guarantee that a product will work as planned.

The 3D virtual world has two key powers. One is the capacity to connect people, so that an organisation can capture and catalyse a collective knowledge and imagination that was previously impossible to federate. The second is its ability to evaluate total cost of ownership and optimise a product as a social good. Our long-term dream is to be able to contribute to social progress along these two dimensions.

Dassault Systèmes makes sophisticated mathematic and scientific models userfriendly. Through our 3D solutions and the extraordinary fusion and confusion of the real and virtual worlds, we help people build and test products for a better life. The 3D virtual world is so effective that it has the power to improve the real world. Imagining, testing and verifying in the virtual world helps create the best products for consumers and the environment, ultimately improving our quality of life.

Bernard Charlès is president and CEO at Dassault Systèmes

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Prime magazine.