With time-to-deployment and high consulting costs continuing to hamper the widespread adoption of PLM, Dassault Systemes has joined a number of its competitors in this space and rolled out packaged solutions for specific vertical industries.
Dassault's Industry Solutions BPCs (Business Process Content) draw on Dassault's years of experience in creating preconfigured Industry Solutions for customers in the aerospace and automotive segments, among other markets. The Dassault development team identified parts of its PLM solution that could deliver value across a wide spectrum of industries as well as repackaged knowledge gleaned from specific customer deployments. The results were encapsulated and will be offered as the Industry Solution BPC family.
For Dassault customers and potential PLM users, the Industry Solution BPCs (or accelerators, as Dassault calls them) provide proven, industry best practices and competencies that can be tailored easily to meet a manufacturer's specific business requirements, the Paris-based company said. At the same time, the offering serves as a platform upon which to more efficiently implement PLM at a fraction of the cost of earlier frameworks that required a lot of hands-on, custom consulting work, Dassault officials claimed.
Dassault competitors UGS Corp. (Plano, TX) and Agile Software Corp. (San Jose, CA) are among the vendors pursuing a vertical-market PLM strategy in earnest. UGS has packaged PLM solutions for the automotive and consumer packaged goods industries, among other segments, while Agile has targeted high tech and electronics, medical devices, and consumer packaged goods. Both also offer packaged PLM offerings for specific verticals and specific business processes (for example, compliance) aimed at helping small and mid-sized manufacturers more readily deploy PLM.
"The vendors are all trying to do the same thing -- to package the fundamental capabilities along with built-in best practices and processes so that the software is already tuned to the way a given set of industry users work," explained Ken Amann, director of research for CIMdata Inc., a market research firm in Ann Arbor, MI. "It makes the adoption cycle faster for them and is far less expensive."
A lot of the legwork from Dassault's vertical-market push stems from its recent acquisition of MatrixOne Inc., of Westford, MA. MatrixOne, which had a strong following in the high-tech and electronics, medical device, and aerospace markets, had been active in packaging its PLM components and best practice industry knowledge into specific, vertical editions of its PLM platform.
Leveraging that effort to create the accelerators reflects Dassault's commitment to improving customers' performance. "BPCs or accelerators speed up the deployment of PLM solutions and bring great value that leverage our industry experience without major investment," said Bruno Latchague, executive vice president of development & support, industry solutions, for Dassault, in a prepared statement.
The new accelerators, 18 in total and due for release July 21, are built on the V5R16 release of CATIA, ENOVIA VPLM, and ENOVIA SmarTeam. They include:
- PLM Engineering Desktop (PED): An accelerator to speed deployment of collaborative applications and relational product development in the automotive and aerospace industries
- Aerospace Supplier Collaborative Hub: Provides pre-configured data models and business processes and strengthens collaboration among customers, partners, and suppliers in the aerospace industry
- Collaborative System Engineering (CSE): Adds analysis and simulation functions to manage safety levels and assessments required for certification in the aerospace, automation, and railway industries
- Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP): Takes on a critical automotive business process around quality, helping companies manage documents and ensure compliance to drive quality improvements throughout product design and manufacturing
- Integrated Mechanical Product Development (IMPD): Aimed at optimizing the printed circuit board (PCB) development process for electronics manufacturers
CIMdata's Amann said it makes sense for Dassault to initially target the accelerators at companies in markets it already serves. He also expects additional BPCs to be released for other industries moving forward, noting that companies of all sizes can benefit from this kind of packaged offering.
"Why should a company keep reinventing the wheel?" Amann said. "The need for best practices are common whether a company is big or small."