Looking to speed up design and cut costs, BMW’s management board announced today that it will replace the PTC PLM software it uses for gasoline engines, installing Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA PLM in its place.
The move unifies most of BMW’s 3D design on CATIA. Previously, the carmaker used PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER PLM for gasoline engines and CATIA for diesel engines and most other aspects of car design. The company would not say whether it would use CATIA to design electric engines, an emerging product area where PLM software is unproven.
By migrating gasoline engine design to CATIA, the German automaker hopes to reduce repetitive design tasks and minimize the integration, updating, maintenance, and training for its product lifecycle management software, including computer-aided design (CAD).
“This is a tidying up of our CAD landscape,” Rene Wies, BMW’s group head of process and IT for engineering, told Managing Automation in an interview.