Reuse: Action or practice of using an item, whether for its original purpose (conventional reuse) or to fulfill a different function (creative reuse or repurposing).
Wikipedia
With the rise in dialogue about and action toward sustainability, “reuse” is becoming modus operandi in organizations: The outdoor clothing company Patagonia offers Refcrafted, a line of clothes made from other clothes. In Oslo, students are housed in a complex located in a former grain elevator. The beer bottles you bought last weekend will be refilled fifteen times before they are recycled into new glass. The process of designing and engineering products and services also benefits from the practice of reusing knowledge. In this post, we will examine how the 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps teams and individuals share knowledge and data to foster knowledge reuse.
A Single, Integrated Platform for All Information
It starts with a single 3D environment for designers, engineers and other stakeholders both inside and outside an organization. Capturing and consolidating all information on a single platform lets teams build and make available a consistent representation of their innovations, products and services. This single platform facilitates sharing and reusing knowledge, such as past know-how, rules, standards and designs in other projects. The sharing of information across different teams contributes to improved operational efficiency and responsiveness toward market demands.
At Alps Alpine, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform centrally manages information allowing people to share knowledge and data easily. Consolidating everything on one single platform that connects all information makes it possible for Alps Alpine to quickly obtain the design information everyone is looking for. A unified knowledge base encourages their designers to pool their expertise and share ideas more freely, and facilitates the re-use of knowledge from past projects.
Speed Up Innovation
A single, centralized platform offers direct benefits to approach innovation. One of the most impactful is accelerated design cycles since parts and components created for a specific project may be reused many times in different projects. Another big advantage: Teams do not have to start from scratch when working on a new design. They can easily combine previously created components, which speeds up the creation of a new product that meets a client’s specific requirements.
At Honda Life Creation Center, everything is stored on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This helps any team member quickly find what they are looking for and reuse common parts – such as standard bolts – often found in mass-produced goods. The success of start-up YURI in making microgravity research accessible to all industries lies in its ability to build hardware using modular blocks and reusing knowledge and designs, going from ideation stage to experiment launch in a matter of months. Taking a modular approach has allowed YURI to repurpose part designs instead of developing everything from scratch, which in turn helps keep costs under control.
Identify Issues Early and Reduce Risk
In many industries, not delivering on time and to specifications is mitigated by costly penalty clauses in contracts. By reusing previous projects’ knowledge that is centralized on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, organizations can compare a current build against past projects and find similarities to minimize the risk for some of the components or sub-systems. Potential issues are identified before they become costly problems at manufacturing time or even worst, after they are in the hands of customers.
Building specialty machinery is a high-risk business. Axelent Engineering mitigates risk by creating a design library and database on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform has helps them compare a machine in development against past projects to learn from past mistakes. These improvements in the design phase translate to benefits in the aftersales 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.
Inspire Better Design and Prepare the Next Generation of Designers
Each design reflects a designer’s individuality, experience and technical expertise. A unified knowledge base encourages designers and engineers to pool their expertise and share ideas more freely, as well as promote the reuse of past learnings and experiences. This leads to better products and services. Gathering and making available information on past projects such as design libraries, project templates and quality profiles promote 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
The ultimate goal of capturing and reusing knowledge and designs is to help organizations create better products, services, and experiences with fewer resources and effort. Acting as a single platform for all information, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform promotes knowledge sharing and encourages the reuse of past experiences and designs. This speeds up innovation and time to market, reduces risks associated new designs and nurtures excellence across all disciplines.
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.