Technology Update
IBM and Dassault Systèmes Announce Version 5 Release 11 of their Product Lifecycle Management Portfolio
"Built-in Reality" - V5R11 PLM portfolio delivers unmatched product realism and leading-edge solutions for real-world industry needs.
IBM and Dassault Systèmes announced the release of Version 5 Release 11 (V5R11) of their product lifecycle management (PLM) portfolio, comprised of CATIA® for collaborative product development, and ENOVIA™ and SMARTEAM® for lifecycle management, collaboration and decision support. Concurrently, Dassault Systèmes announced V5R11 of DELMIA™ for the engineering of lean manufacturing processes.
Built-in Reality is the core concept of V5R11. It characterizes the exceptional level of realism now attainable in product and process simulation. It also reflects the high value that V5R11 delivers resulting from IBM and Dassault Systèmes' extensive experience working with industry-leading companies to create realistic, effective PLM solutions.
V5R11 PLM solutions bring companies one step closer to e-business on demand by enabling them to become more responsive, focused, resilient and variable in ever-changing markets. The new features of the V5R11 PLM portfolio provide value to customers in the following areas:
Predictive Lifecycle - Improved ability to anticipate product behavior and manufacturing operations. V5R11 simulates products realistically so that customers can anticipate in detail the behavior of future products and factory manufacturing operations. This reduces the risk of product failure, production inefficiency, market mismatches, and after-delivery compliance cost (products that cost more to make than they can be sold for).
Engineering Emotion - Greater power to build the look and feel of a product. V5R11 offers new innovative tools to better capture the aesthetic, visual design that designers intend for a product. It also provides the user more high-productivity tools to control and engineer product shape and deliver styled products that can be manufactured easily.
Secure Circulation of Intellectual Property - A framework for safe sharing of IP. V5R11 delivers enhanced security and authentication mechanisms for collaboration and collective decision-making processes. Information representing high-value IP, such as knowledge rules or CAE analysis data, is managed in a controlled environment where intelligence is applied at every level. Access from outside engineering is enhanced with ENOVIA's use of WebSphere Portal.
PLM Accessibility for All - Strengthened entry PLM across all industries. V5R11 becomes even more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and gives them a significant competitive edge. Now SMBs in all industries, including Fabrication and Assembly, Electronics, and Consumer Goods, benefit from complete PLM solutions.
Turning Experience into Value - Leveraged PLM deployment know-how delivers core processes productivity. V5R11 increases the benefits of IBM and Dassault Systemes' extensive experience in deploying PLM solutions for industry-leading companies. V5R11 contains specialized, high-value features for the major core processes of all manufacturing industries, including Automotive, Aerospace and Electronics industries.
"Ensuring customer product success is the ultimate goal of V5R11," said Bernard Charlès, president and CEO of Dassault Systèmes. "With a focus on increased reality - whether putting more realism in virtual product simulation, leveraging our extensive experience, or responding to real industry needs - V5R11 helps our customers produce successful products. The more they can anticipate a product's behavior, the more they can avoid problems and reduce risks. In today's competitive marketplace, getting it right the first time for a rapid return on investment is critical."
"Innovation and cooperation are two cornerstones of our development strategy," said Anders Romare, Director PLM Solution Center, Volvo IT, a leading PLM service provider to the automotive and discrete manufacturing industry. "The V5 PLM Platform helps us achieve these objectives by making it easier to realistically simulate components and anticipate their operation. This combined with improved reuse of corporate knowledge rules means that we can better leverage our know how with suppliers and partners and boosts collaboration across the extended enterprise. All of this translates into lower development costs, shorter development cycles, and more interesting, innovative products."
V5R11 Brand Highlights:
CATIA for collaborative product development - offers a range of new products and enhanced features for mastering product success in the Automotive, Aerospace, Fabrication & Assembly, Shipbuilding, Consumer Goods, and Electrical & Electronics industries, as well as enhanced entry
PLM products for small and medium-sized companies.
ENOVIA for lifecycle management and decision support - transforms the customer's product development organization into a source of competitive advantage with increased support for complex product design, and a practical Web environment to bring marketing, sales and customers earlier into the product development cycle - where 80% of product costs are committed.
SMARTEAM for lifecycle and product data management - enhances and accelerates the proliferation of product knowledge and business processes across the enterprise and product value chain with tighter CAD integrations, expanded collaborative design, improved web collaboration, new methodologies, and improved data capture, mining, and reuse capabilities. SMARTEAM will also feature IBM Websphere Express, a flexible, low cost solution for enterprise integration for disparate application environments.
DELMIA for the engineering of lean manufacturing processes - includes enhanced end-to-end coverage for the Automotive industry, better integration of product design and assembly processes, Knowledge-based tools for creating process plans, and a DELMIA-CENIT solution for 3D laser cutting.
HP Workstations Certified for CATIA
Since December, Dassault Systemes has certified three new HP workstations for CATIA, ensuring that CATIA users have access to the highest performing, most reliable workstation solutions available.
After putting these systems through a variety of rigorous tests, CATIA and HP have certified the hp workstation xw4000 and the hp workstation xw5000 for use with CATIA V5 and ENOVIA. This certification includes a variety of graphics cards and both Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.
As of January 2003, Dassault has also certified the Compaq Evo N800w Mobile Workstation with ATI Mobility Fire GL 9000 and 64 MB DDR graphics card for CATIA, providing engineers and designers a mobile platform that sacrifices nothing in performance or reliability.
How to be a Trendsetter: Dassault and IBM PLM Customers Swap Tales from the PLM Front
By Sidney Hill, Jr., Executive Editor MSI
A little-known fact about the Jeep Cherokee-the vehicle that launched America's ongoing love affair with the sport utility vehicle-is that it also inspired the burgeoning business process known as product life-cycle management, or PLM.
It all started in 1985, two years before Chrysler Corp. purchased American Motors Corp.-the actual inventor of the Jeep. "We were looking for a way to speed up our product development process to compete better against larger competitors," recalls Francois Castaing, who was the head of engineering at American Motors and later assumed the same position at Chrysler.
The Jeep Grand Cherokee launched America's love affair with the SUV and may also have inspired the growth of PLM. The first move in this quest for faster product development was the purchase of a computer-aided design (CAD) software system-specifically, the CATIA package from Dassault Systemes, a French company that distributes its products in North America through a partnership with Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM. Castaing related this story during his keynote address at the annual meeting of the CATIA Operators Exchange.
Castaing told the estimated 1,000 attendees that CATIA made individual engineers working on the Jeep Cherokee more productive by allowing them to create on computers rather than drafting tables. But the system had an even bigger impact on the corporation. "It helped with communication," Castaing said of the system that allowed engineers to pull product drawings and other documents from a central database. "Conflicts were resolved faster. Engineering changes were reduced."
Suddenly, engineers were spending less time dealing with internal squabbles over existing designs and more time researching what features consumers wanted to see in future Jeep models. By the mid-1990s, when Ford and General Motors already had begun producing their own SUVs to compete with the Jeep, Castaing said Chrysler had installed another application to serve as the central repository for all product-related data, and that this system had even bigger impact on the company.
This system, known generically as a product data management (PDM) application, was the foundation for what Castaing referred to as "a data pipeline" that ran throughout the enterprise. At this point, Castaing said, "Chrysler had moved from just connecting product designers to connecting everyone involved in designing and building the product."
That essentially defines what a PLM system does, and manufacturers around the world are acquiring these packages with the same fervor that American consumers are snapping up SUVs. Daratech-an IT market research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.-expects manufacturers to purchase more than $8 billion in PLM-related products and services this year alone. And there are good reasons for companies to make such expenditures.
In 1996, when Chrysler was still an early adopter of PLM technology, Castaing said it was the auto industry's lowest-cost producer, recording development costs that were half of the industry average. Since then other automakers have closed that gap, and several of them now produce cars at a lower cost than Chrysler. But Castaing, who is now retired, believes that situation warrants more aggressive use of PLM technology.
The growing consensus among PLM vendors and users is that getting the most value from a PLM strategy requires linking PLM applications with other enterprise systems. "The systems must be configured to handle workflow, not just data exchange," argues Bernard Charles, president and CEO of Dassault Systemes, a French company that distributes its products in North America through a partnership with the PLM business unit of IBM, Armonk, N.Y.
Bernard Charles, president and CEO of Dassault Systemes, says companies not only need to expand their use of PLM software to remain competitive in today's market, but they must also expand the manner in which they use the technology. The primary goal, Charles says, should be to use PLM technology to gather information about what should go into products from a broad range of sources-customers, suppliers, and your own employees outside of engineering.
The way to accomplish that, Charles says, is to create a network in which data can be shared freely between the CAD and PDM components of a PLM suite and other business systems such as enterprise resources planning (ERP), supply chain management, and customer relationship management applications. "These systems have to be built to handle workflow, not just data exchange," he says.
Cessna Aircraft Co., Wichita, Kan., improved its product development process by adopting PLM technology, according to Jeff Schiesser, the company's director of business integration and product development. Cessna has been designing its products with CATIA since the 1980s, Schiesser told MSI, but it sped the development process in the late 1990s by adopting the ENOVIA PDM component of the CATIA suite.
This system allowed Cessna to start classifying and storing its data according to product structure, which was a change from its previous method of storing data according to drawing numbers. Under the new model, a Cessna employee can find any part they are looking for by clicking on a button for an aircraft subassembly, such as the hydraulic system. That will take them to a list of every part in the hydraulic system. They can then click on a part and get detailed information, including drawings, for that part.
Schiesser said this approach has significantly reduced the amount of time Cessna engineers spend looking for information when working on new designs. It also has encouraged engineers to reuse previous designs more often, in addition to fostering greater cooperation among engineers.
Cessna also has adopted its own version of the data pipeline concept that Castaing said worked so well at Chrysler. Since all departments within the company can access product data through ENOVIA, Schiesser said Cessna has adopted a policy that says once a product design is deemed 60-percent complete, the downstream departments-purchasing, manufacturing, etc.-can begin whatever activities they need to do to get that product built.
There is no fear of major problems developing after this point, Schiesser said, because all departments have been involved in the design process from the beginning, and they also will get automatic notice through ENOVIA of any design changes. The bottom line with this system, Schiesser said, is "we have nearly eliminated downstream rework. We are seeing parts that fit right the first time, and that is leading us to build higher-quality products at lower cost."
Philippe Forestier, a Dassault Systemes vice president, says the latest version of CATIA-called CATIA V5-can help companies take that concept further. The CATIA V5 suite contains four applications:
A PDM application called ENOVIA that's typically used manufacturers of complex products like autos or airplanes; A second PDM package called SMARTEAM that caters to manufacturers of less-complex products such as electronics and consumer packaged goods; and a program called DELMIA that takes data from the engineering department and converts it to the proper format for programming production equipment on the factory floor.
Forestier said Dassault created a new architecture for CATIA V5 that allows the system to run on Microsoft Windows NT servers, and also enables smooth integration between the components of the suite. Equally important, Forestier said, is a new middleware layer that uses eXtensible markup language-based standards to facilitate integration between the CATIA applications and other enterprise applications.
Cessna's Schiesser said he "agrees wholeheartedly" that getting the full value from PLM requires a connection to enterprise business applications. He cautioned, however, that it would take time to build those links. "Our primary focus in the beginning was imposing better discipline in our product development process, and getting downstream departments like purchasing and manufacturing into the loop. We are now just looking at the possibility of installing a new ERP system, so we will have to do that before we can talk about real integration with PLM."
| 
