High-performance organizations understand collaboration is a key component of their success and are deploying a number of best practices to drive collaborative efficiencies. As discussed in Connecting and Collaborating Parts 1 and 2, business platforms, such as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, play a key role in supporting and improving these best practices. In this post, we will examine how the 3DEXPERIENCE platform unlocks better, more holistic collaboration and helps teams and individuals to work better together.
The Foundation: A Single Version of the Truth for All
It starts with a single version of the truth: The 3DEXPERIENCE platform creates the conditions for a common language and methodologies to share inside and outside your company. Next, it makes your version of the truth always visible to your stakeholders across all disciplines – design, engineering, lifecycle management, manufacturing, operations, customer service, etc.
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 and traceability. Finally, it enables additional opportunities for excellence by making it easy to leverage learnings (often in the form of data) across the different teams to make better, more informed decisions.
For Flow Robotics, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform means all disciplines and stakeholders have a single view into the product lifecycle that creates a better understanding of each project status at any given point in time. For Bureau Veritas, the single digital representation of each vessel is shared and allows 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.
The Payoff: Support Talent Inside and Outside Your Enterprise
How do companies take advantage of the expertise dispersed across different locations inside and outside of their enterprise? More importantly, how can more effectively bringing people together help achieve remarkable results? By deploying a single, secure, collaborative environment made available in the cloud (or, if preferred – on premise) that helps all team members interact with one another in the context of the processes, content, and data. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps companies carry out work as a single unit – tightening working relationships between designers, engineers, suppliers and even customers.
By connecting individuals, teams, departments and vendors, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps everyone work more efficiently and productively on an engagement layer available anywhere, anytime, on any device. Stakeholders inside and outside your company can 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 can instantly act their idea, no matter where they are.
For Yeşilova Group, this holistic collaboration helps them identify and resolve design issues early, avoiding the costly rework that results when such issues are discovered closer to production time. At Vertical Aerospace, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform brings even non-CAD teams together, allowing all stakeholders to use web-based apps to see the aerodynamic shape, the structure and interrogate the bill of materials.
The Upshot: Take Advantage of Versatile Collaborative Options
As already established, platform integrating project management and collaboration is instrumental to formalize and orchestrate projects, activities and processes and to create real time visibility and traceability. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows team members to interact in real-time and tracks interactions in the context of the processes, the content, the data and the involved parties. In this way, collaboration is both focused and fluid.
But the 3DEXPERIENCE platform also allows for less structured collaboration and interaction in the form of smaller virtual spaces (communities and conversations) that let individuals convene for a specific purpose in a more ad hoc manner. The spaces could be active for a few days to solve an unforeseen issue or on a more permanent basis to allow customers to participate in co-creation activities.
Platforms with strong collaboration capabilities have an intrinsic asynchronous quality, making them ideal for global value chains (and their participants). In a sense, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables consistent collaboration without requiring every single contributor to be available at the same time.
For Flow Robotics, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows staff to elevate the discussions among the team. People can see what is discussed in meetings and everyone can access the same data. The platform also allows employees to brainstorm in smaller teams and make instantly available the results or work done to the greater team.
Conclusion
Today’s best-in-class organizations understand that tight collaboration across their value network is a key component of their success. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform facilitates phenomenal collaboration in context of the processes, the data, the teams and the applications. This all-in-one approach allows organizations and their value network to work together in a more holistic way that generates efficiencies throughout the entire process or project.
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.