Behind the data: Using information intelligence to understand and drive innovation

Dassault Systèmes at CES 2020 will continue to drive the conversation around digital transformation to create sustainable innovations. Data plays a critical role in meeting consumer expectations and desires centered on the personalized experiences a product delivers. We’re going to look at connecting ideas, data, people and solutions with our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and the power of virtual worlds.

With so much depending on data, we asked Morgan Zimmermann, CEO of NETVIBES–EXALEAD brands of Dassault Systèmes, to talk with us about capturing the value in all that data.

3D Perspectives: How can we use data as an enabler to create intelligence and business advantage for a company?

Morgan Zimmermann: Well, it’s very fundamental. We want a company and its employees to be augmented with the power of the distributed knowledge that comes from their peers, their partners, their customers; and we want those people to be augmented individually and collectively. That’s the Workforce of the Future.

We are probably the only player in the market that is putting together in a comprehensive, available form so much data-driven collaboration power. Many companies are doing data collection and analytics, but none are considering how decisions are discussed and built in a traceable manner across the organization.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is connecting the dots between data and the users, making sure that every single employee (whether designing the next product, or maintaining an existing product, or optimizing a process in manufacturing or wherever) has all the relevant knowledge available at their fingertips, and in the exact place where they will be working and collaborating.

Now, that data may be representing anything from the knowledge of our customers, the knowledge of the employees within our customers, the knowledge of their customers’ customers, eventually up to the knowledge of the usage of the products they are selling.

3DP: What is the benefit of the virtual world when we’re talking about data?

MZ: May I make a “simple” analogy? Our customers are in continuous, performance-driven operations against their competitors, through the market, with the consumers, for sustainability targets or cost targets.

It is interesting to look at how the “military” runs operations. Indeed, when they prepare a mission, they do not have one guy with a spreadsheet locating the enemy’s troops and another guy with with the location of the resources. Everything is projected on a map, because the map enables the planners to connect the dots, to create the context.

Now in the case of our customers, operations are for the performance of an asset, a car, an aircraft, or a plant, a factory. If you really want to contextualize how the engine is behaving, how it has been designed, manufactured, maintained, if you want to understand the system structure of that equipment so you can do the proper interpretation, you need a map. Except this map cannot be 2D on a static spreadsheet. It has to be a virtual product. So the value of the virtual world in the world of data is that it provides the context, the projection, the system, the referential to navigate, conceptualize and understand what’s happening and what will happen.

Many people will talk about predictive maintenance, and of course, Dassault Systèmes is delivering predictive maintenance; but we can do so much more. Because we are in a virtual world, not only can we do data-driven prediction, but we can do simulation-driven prediction. With two impacts, we can generate data to serve machine learning with “extreme” situations you wouldn’t want to experience in real life, and we can use simulation to play “what if” scenarios for finding the best resolution path!

Talking about resolution paths, it is important to keep in mind that with 3D, we have eliminated the “language” challenge. Providing a language-agnostic representation of the data, with built in collaborative problem-solving capabilities, allows you to reconnect peoples’ knowledge and know-how that may sit in many countries and time zones.

Last but not least, there is a “positive” side effect to our discussion; indeed, since all decisions are simulated, instantiated in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, it now allows continuous learning so that everything you do becomes traceable, capitalized and improves the experience of your peers.

3DP: How are new technologies like 5G having an impact?

MZ: 5G is for activating and connecting everything. It will allow capturing greater knowledge on product usage and employee usage and who is doing what. It’s also a way for everyone to distribute and leverage all such data.

[For more info: see a recent 3D Perspectives post What 5G means for you and your business.]

Think about the employee with 5G. He’s now capable through a mobile phone of capturing every single piece of maintenance information, of reaching an engineer in a few clicks to help him understand how to repair this specific piece of equipment, just because he has simplified access. The aggregated, distributable knowledge can be leveraged by anyone on the team.

You have an engineer somewhere alone in the world; and with augmented reality, he could look at the equipment he is maintaining; and through his headset access the distributed, real-time knowledge and know-how from the last 30 years of the company, which includes the last 10 minutes and the last 10 years from anywhere in the world.

3DP: So it’s instant access, instant collaboration, creating an instant team?

MZ: Exactly right. It is an enabler for collaboration, an enabler for anyone to reveal the distributed knowledge, an enabler for instantaneous collaboration with anyone as required.

3DP: So what do you see as the implications of all this?

Morgan Zimmermann: Since 2012, we’ve talked about the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as data-driven and model-based. The combination of learning from data and applying science and model-based simulation is unique. So when we describe the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as data-driven and model-based, it has a profound meaning, which is very well illustrated by what the ECCO company is doing with their personalized shoes (which we will show at CES 2020).

We can learn from the data, and then use science, modelling and simulation to leverage that data for products. We’re doing it for shoes; but it applies equally to what we can do in maintaining factory automation, generative design, generative compound optimization in life sciences, personalized medicine. It’s already real.

NOTE: Join Dassault Systèmes at CES 2020 at pavilion #4623 in Tech East. See how 3DEXPERIENCE virtual worlds let you imagine personalized innovation.