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Nissan Contract Powers UGS In Automotive Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox
Posted on Wednesday, February 01, 2006 10:00:00 AM |
UGS beat out rival Dassault Systemes (Paris) for the contract after a two-year evaluation by Nissan, says Bill Carrelli, vice president for strategic marketing at Plano, TX-based UGS.
The PLM provider described the Nissan deal as its largest contract win in 2005.
Nissan said it will use UGS's NX CAD software globally to design vehicles, as well as UGS' Teamcenter collaborative Product Development Management software to manage product data.
"It was a sizeable win for us," Carrelli says. "We feel it was validation of where we've been taking our product. We introduced NX two years ago as our next-generation product, and NX4 is the culmination of that with knowledge management, integration, and data management features. They helped us win this deal."
Analysts agree. "This was more of a reaffirmation that UGS is a serious player in automotive," says Charles Foundyller, president of Daratech Inc. (Cambridge, MA). UGS already had several major automotive customers, including General Motors, Foundyller notes. And the company's Teamcenter PDM product is widely in use, even at manufacturers such as Mercedes that have standardized on non-UGS CAD systems. "But this deal was all about CAD, and this says UGS is a serious CAD player," Foundyller says.
In coming out on top of Dassault, UGS replaces an incumbent supplier at Nissan. In 1999, when Nissan and French car maker Renault entered into an alliance which led to joint management of the two companies, Renault standardized on Dassault's CATIA CAD tools. That alliance, however, kicked off a series of multi-year corporate improvement initiatives which, among other things, called for Nissan to significantly increase the number of car models it produced while also slashing to 10 months the time it took to develop a new model. As an outgrowth of those initiatives, Carrelli says, Nissan two years ago began to search for a PLM tool set which it could deploy globally.
Nissan becomes UGS' second major automotive OEM customer. General Motors, UGS' largest single customer, has also standardized on the company's PLM tools. Ford, Carrelli says, uses UGS' tools for power-train design while relying on Dassault's CATIA for body design.
Nissan is still putting together its PLM deployment plan, Carrelli says. Financial contributions from the Nissan deal will be reflected in UGS' financial results beginning in 2006, he says.
UGS, however, should not get too comfortable with its Nissan relationship, Foundyller warns. He predicts that Dassault will continue to court Nissan in the hopes of reversing its decision. "This was a battle royal, and it continues to be," Foundyller says.
This article originally appeared in the February 2006 issue of Managing Automation magazine.
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