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Dassault Announces 3D Acquisition, New Mid-Market PLM Product Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox
Posted on Thursday, October 04, 2007 4:30:00 PM |
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DETROIT — Dassault Systemes, known for its 3D and product lifecycle management products, made two announcements this week to accelerate its push to the virtual world of digital manufacturing. The company said it has completed the acquisition of Seemage Inc., a purveyor of 3D document management software, and announced a new product, dubbed DELMIA PLM Express, a scaled-down version of its PLM software geared toward small and mid-sized companies. At first glance, the announcements, made at Dassault's North American DELMIA customer conference here, seem unrelated. But the new software set will act as a catalyst to move PLM and virtual 3D design to the masses, the company said.For example, the Seemage technology, based on XML architecture, can move 3D design information to desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office. As a result, 3D product-related data becomes accessible to users beyond the engineering ranks — including customer service, technical training, sales, and marketing departments.Dassault will integrate this capability across its entire product portfolio, which includes CATIA, for virtual product design; DELMIA, for virtual production planning; ENOVIA, for global collaborative lifecycle management; SIMULIA, for virtual product testing; and SolidWorks, a 3D mechanical design tool."This brings a nice capability to foster collaboration," said DELMIA's vice president of marketing and business development, Peter Schmitt, in an interview with Managing Automation. "It adds easy collaboration of 3D data in order to share with non-traditional users."The effort to extend 3D design throughout the corporation is not unlike what Adobe Systems did earlier this year with its release of Acrobat 3D version 8 software, designed to drive 3D CAD data to anyone in the organization. "Yes, we are going in the same direction as Adobe," Schmitt said, "but the big difference is that we are creating the data as well." The value-add is the ability to push consistent data across functional departments, he said. DELMIA PLM Express, on the other hand, is another way to push data out, but this time it is to parts suppliers, engineering firms, and tooling OEMs — those smaller companies in the manufacturing value chain that don't have the financial means or the need to invest in a comprehensive and pricey PLM product. The PLM Express product is geared toward companies with five to 50 or more people. It is offered in five role-based domains for manufacturing, including work cell building, spot welding, human work analysis, assembly process planning, and virtual commissioning. PLM Express is "the gateway to digital manufacturing," said Philippe Charles, CEO of DELMIA in his keynote presentation. The reason: It gives every entity in the supply chain the ability to contribute to the digital manufacturing process, observers say."The PLM market is dominated by Dassault Systemes and UGS offerings, which are very sophisticated and not cheap," said Ed Miller, president of CIMdata, in an interview. "They are fine for the high-end user in aerospace or automotive, but there's no opportunity to spread it across industries." To that end, smaller, specialty suppliers have been ignored in the PLM chain, he said. "Once [PLM] gets to the mid part of the market, things will get interesting ... With smaller companies comes more volume and new problems that will push advances and get us to digital manufacturing."Another way that Dassault plans to make digital manufacturing a part of real life is by rolling out an online 3D community creating "lifelike experiences." The virtual world, called 3DVIA, will let individuals experience the way a product will be used, for example. The company announced 3DVIA in June, and expects to have a full build-out of the online community by 2010. "It's not Second Life; it's first life," DELMIA's Charles said, referring to secondlife.com, a 3D online virtual world. "It is experiencing something as if you already have it."
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