Companies using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can be very different from one to another, but in most cases, they have a single goal in common: gaining an edge or benefit the competition does not have or cannot replicate easily. Recently we explored 4 benefits gained by companies using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Let’s now look into four additional ways businesses – from startups to very large enterprises – benefit from adopting a business and innovation platform.
1. More Holistic Collaboration
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform creates the conditions for a common language and methodologies to share inside and outside your company. Having a single representation of your project, innovation, product or service empowers all stakeholders to perform various processes, calculations or tasks and then share statuses and results. This accelerates cross-discipline collaboration and boosts transparency.
By connecting individuals, teams, departments and vendors, the platform helps everyone work more efficiently on apps available anywhere, anytime, on any device. Stakeholders inside and outside your company easily access, edit and review any model or document in real time, rendering file exchanges over servers or insecure email outdated. Moreover, when inspiration strikes, people instantly act on their idea, no matter where they are.
For Flow Robotics, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows staff to elevate discussions among the team. Even if they were not present, people see what was discussed in meetings and can access the same data. Employees brainstorm in smaller teams and make instantly available the results to the greater team via the platform. For Bureau Veritas, the single digital representation of each vessel is shared, allowing anyone in the extended team to perform various calculations such as structural verification, stability calculation and corrosion follow-up, a major improvement over past practices.
2. Earlier Identification of Issues
In many industries, not delivering on time and to specifications triggers costly penalty clauses in contracts. By reusing previous projects’ knowledge centralized on the platform, organizations can compare a planned build against past projects to find similarities to minimize potential issues on some of the components or sub-systems. Issues are identified before they become costly problems at manufacturing time or even worse, after they are in the hands of customers.
Axelent Engineering mitigates risk by creating a design library and database on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This helps them compare a machine in development against past projects to learn from mistakes and issues. Making these improvements in the design phase translate to benefits in the after-sale phase of the product lifecycle: the company’s presence at customer’s sites fixing problems is five to ten times lower of what it used to be. For Yeşilova Group, the platform helps them identify and resolve design issues early, avoiding the costly rework that results when such issues are discovered closer to production time.
3. Better Visibility
The unified environment of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides better visibility into each process or project with traceability of changes and decisions. It also extends this visibility to customers. By virtually simulating the build process, companies can show their customer an immersive 3D virtual experience to get comments and changes, making it easier to discover required adjustments early in the design phase.
At IMC Toys, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform gives stakeholders a visualization of a project’s status at any given time, as well as quick access to all project information. For CSSC Huangpu Wenchong Shipyard, combining design, manufacturing and project management in the platform creates a single integrated view to manage ship development in real-time.
4. Inspire and Prepare the Next Generation of Professionals
Each project reflects a designer’s individuality, experience and technical expertise. A unified environment shared by designers and engineers encourages them to pool their expertise and collaborate on ideas more freely. This leads to better products and services. Gathering and making available information on past projects such as design libraries, project templates and quality profiles promotes the development of best practices. It helps young designers and engineers entering the workforce accelerate the acquisition of industry knowledge.
As Michihito Okado, strategic planning for product and technology division designer at Honda Life Creation Center said, ”by working together on the same platform we can tweak each other’s work, which I think leads to a greater scope of design”.
Conclusion
An innovation and business platform such as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a unified environment critical to imagine, create and deliver the next generation of products, services and experiences. No matter the size or the mission of your company, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps you collaborate more holistically, identify and mitigate potential issues earlier, gain better visibility into projects and nurture the next generation of professionals.
Pierre is a Marketing Director at Dassault Systèmes. He has been working in the high-tech industry over the past 20 years. His experience spans development, consulting, product management, and marketing roles in small to very large companies. Pierre also holds a BCompSc and a MBA.