Over 200 industry leaders from transportation & mobility joined us online for a live interactive event – Driving Resilience in Automotive & Transportation. Dassault Systèmes experts and customers joined online, sharing insights, tools and approaches to get back on track in 2020 and continuing beyond in a more resilient position.
The transportation and mobility industry transformed to the new era of mobility-on-demand with new solutions that are more environmentally-friendly, more citizen-friendly and more affordable. However, the COVID-19 crisis posed dramatic challenges in an instant – global lock down, dramatic drop in car sales, drop in production, all igniting a deep change in people’s relationship with cars.
Car makers and suppliers demonstrated their agility by adapting to new consumer purchasing behaviors, scaling remote working across all parts of the business and investing in processes to ensure they have the right data in real time to make the right decisions. Companies also demonstrated their responsibility – adapting production quickly to produce masks, respirators, medical equipment needed to overcome shortages to combat the crisis.
Emerging from the crisis, companies should focus on three key issues: WORK REMOTELY, WORK QUICKLY and WORK SAFELY.
WORK REMOTELY: Enable remote-office collaborative engineering efficiently for everyone
Lightyear is a new player in the OEM landscape, designing next-generation clean mobility for everyone, everywhere using solar energy. Their mission: make a positive impact and take responsibility for energy transition. By 2035, they plan to deliver Lightyear One, the world’s first long-range solar car.
Arjo Van Der Ham, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, described how Lightyear teams easily transitioned to working from home thanks to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud. During the lockdown, they actually improved meeting efficiency, collaboration, productivity, lead-time and agility, although challenges remain for physical prototyping and testing.
Staying connected through a virtual 3DEXPERIENCE twin, shared intelligence with data from everywhere and powerful project planning, work stayed on track. Lightyear is continuing remote working and exploring new ways of attracting talents and hiring people from all over the world. Going forward, they see the entire ecosystem of stakeholders, future customers and suppliers could benefit this new kind of relationship, powered by the platform and cloud.
WORK QUICKLY: Accelerate simulation and testing with no physical equipment
Frédéric Merceron, Solution Director for the Transportation & Mobility industry at Dassault Systèmes, looked at how simulation helps promote and accelerate agility.
Making a difference in the market today is about improving comfort and well-being for drivers and passengers. COVID-19 revealed just how important that is. We can optimize comfort, health and well-being inside vehicles in a number of ways. For example, we can simulate visibility, taking into account windshield fogging and look at how to improve air quality and overall airflow circulation.
Cabin comfort is important, and becoming very complex. Cabin infotainment systems and electronic controls are part of the experience. With so many vehicle domains and performance interconnected, simulations are demanding. Cabin comfort also demands energy, so it is important to optimize best comfort with minimum energy consumption.
Dassault Systèmes’ wants to make simulation available for everyone with a range of simulation. We want to create an environment where engineers and designers can interact for the best results, as well as offer more access to high-end applications and specialists when needed. Finally, deployment needs transparency and simplicity, with easy-to-implement digital solutions that are affordable.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform delivers ready-to-use simulation solutions that have been developed with customers over the last 30 years. User-friendly interfaces and solutions, on-demand simulation and computing capacities on the cloud, with remote quality support from experts when needed, enable customers to purchase only what they need and when they need it.
WORK SAFELY: Ramp up healthy production
Manufacturing has many constraints and risks that are critical to anticipate in order to be more agile and resilient. Henri Beringer, Business Consultant Director in Transportation & Mobility industry at Dassault Systèmes, took a closer look at making agility the norm, while improving safety without compromising efficiency.
It starts with creating an accurate view of factories and manufacturing assets. Generating an executable digital model – a 3DEXPERIENCE twin – enables accurately simulating the plant in operation to investigate alternative future operations while not disrupting current production.
The 3DEXPERIENCE twin is key to efficiency gains – understanding and improving facilities faster, avoiding costly disruptions, and seeing potential impacts of a change. Benefits can include reducing new product commissioning time by 50%, time-to-market by 30%, production and logistics costs by around 20%, while improving worker safety by 25% with fewer work accidents and lower illness rates.
The virtual 3DEXPERIENCE twin can also accelerate more drastic changes, such as developing a manufacturing process for completely new products. During the COVID-19 crisis, automotive industrials transformed their production lines to manufacture face shields and respirators, reusing their existing industrial assets.
You can watch the replay of the event here.
The recent COVID-19 crisis will likely not be the last we will face, but the resilience of the industry has been proven. We are now better equipped, with software as a service, on the cloud, remote working and support, simulation to predict and correct product behavior, efficient and safe manufacturing production, and all through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. While the recent crisis accelerated this transformation, it seems we have arrived at the right time now.
Laurence Montanari serves as Dassault Systemes Vice-President, Transportation & Mobility Industry, helping manufacturers, suppliers and startups leverage the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to adjust, adapt and thrive in a dynamic, market-changing era defined by mobility as a service, sustainability and consumer demands for new experiences.