Dassault Systèmes held the 3DEXPERIENCE FORUM Asia-Pacific on February 13 in Adelaide, South Australia for the first time.
Held at the Adelaide Oval, it was a most appropriate venue for our motto “harmonizing product, nature and life” as the Adelaide Oval is surrounded by verdant and peaceful parks, the River Torrens and the cultural and civic precincts on the south bank.
Over 300 delegates comprising senior public sector officials, C-level executives, business owners and academics from South Australia, France and ASEAN attended the Forum, which kicked off with a traditional Aboriginal “welcome to country” ceremony by Jack Buckskin.
Sox Konno, our Managing Director for Asia Pacific South, and Adam Reid, Executive Director from the Department of State Development, Government of SA, delivered the welcome addresses.
South Australian Deputy Premier, John Rau, was our Guest-of-Honour and Sir Angus Houston, Chair of Defence SA Advisory Board and Special Envoy for South Australia, recorded a video to share his vision for the future of defence. Sir Houston discussed South Australia’s willingness to test and develop new ideas, next generation manufacturing, digital integration and technological development in South Australia.
Aaron Loffler, Senior Business Consultant at Dassault Systèmes, moderated the Digital Transformation in Mining session with mining futurist and AusIMM board member Gavin Yeates. Michelle Ash, Chief Innovation Officer of Barrick Gold also joined in to discuss current challenges facing the natural resources and mining industry, having come off boom prices into a new reality of lower prices, higher costs, and increasing social license demands.
We also caught an exciting glimpse into the (near) future with the New Frontiers in Space session presented by Pierre Marchadier, VP Business Transformation at Dassault Systèmes, and Mathieu Weiss, the Managing Director of CNES (the French government space agency). It was an invigorating discussion on the state of play of space R&D – including Australia’s new role in space, the increasing participation (and driving) of non-government organisations, and even mining of asteroids.
Gavin Hamilton, CTO of the Australian Submarine Corporation, the major naval shipbuilder in Australia, presented ASC’s Digital Journey of transformation to a platform-based collaborative organization. Submarines are highly complex machines, and in the construction and service lifecycle there are about 1,600 contractor entities.
We also heard from Alexandre Parilusyan, VP Worldwide Smart Cities at Dassault Systèmes. He moderated the Sustainable Cities Driven by Data session with George Loh from the National Research Foundation Singapore, and Gary Maguire from the South Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet. We saw what opportunities digitalized virtual cities can offer for understanding the complex city in areas such as simulation.
A key component of the high-tech and science-based future is education and skills. Phillipe Forestier, Executive Vice President, Global Affairs and Communities at Dassault Systèmes moderated Enabling the Future Workforce with Prof. Pascale Quester, Deputy Vice Chancellor and Vice President, University of Adelaide, and Richard Hamer, Education & Skills Director at BAE Systems.
In this session, we saw how integral education is to success, and that it is through the innovative collaboration of industry, government and the institutions that the educational programs are possible. Richard Hamer presented to us the BAE experience in the United Kingdom, and Prof. Quester the exciting new developments in South Australia.
Watch our Virtual Shipyards video here
Finally, we concluded with Sylvain Laurent, Executive VP of Global Field Operations (Asia-Oceania) at Dassault Systèmes, who brought all of the threads of the day together by providing a compelling narrative of collaboration, digitalization, transformation and opportunity.
Watch the highlights in the below video:
Duncan Hall is GEOVIA R&D Applications Manager at Dassault Systèmes, based in Brisbane.