Why you need a 3DEXPERIENCE Platform in 2020

I get really frustrated when I hear about innovation lethargy, because without rapid disruptive innovation it is hard to survive.

Deny it all you like, we’re already advancing fast into the 4th Industrial Revolution.

In this article, we look at why the 4IR isn’t just a bunch of technologies, but instead a way to deliver on the changing demands of us, the consumer.

How it all starts and ends with an enterprise-wide mindset shift and lastly, the need to innovate, collaborate, ideate and design through a networked 3DEXPERIENCE Platform approach, aka a Product Innovation Platform.

What Is The 4IR?

The 4IR is driven by the consumer demand for better, smarter and more personalized products that are delivered faster. It leads to advancements in smart cities and factories and increasingly common automation of tasks and services in our homes and at work.

And it’s infiltrating virtually every aspect of modern life. From consumers to manufacturers to cities, 4IR advancements are becoming more accessible and less costly than ever before.

But as I have said, the 4IR is much more than technology: it’s gradually re-shaping how we think, expect and experience our lives and work and even play.

But Where Does It Start?

To me, it starts with us the consumer expecting something more, but not necessarily knowing what that is….

Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Steve Jobs: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them”

From this, industry needs to respond with creativity and innovation in the new age of collaboration.

Solving Customer Problems

Each day across the world, people are tasked with finding a formula that will solve new customer problems. The chances are that most given the challenge would find some colleagues and set-off within an assigned budget and timeline to come up with the solution.

Of course, that’s the industrial way of doing it, wherein the organization tries to solve challenges through thoughtfully composed in-house teams.

In the digital age, however, problem-solving is everyone’s job and the approach is to collaborate with anyone who has the answer, through a process called “teaming”.

Traditionally all teams have operated as a pretty stationary collection of individuals inside stable boundaries. These individuals develop trust over time, collaborate on well-designed tasks and understand each other’s roles well. However today, teams are becoming increasingly boundary-less and dynamic. The new reality in the digital age is that businesses operate in an environment where the problems are new, big, urgent or unprecedented. 

The New Way Of Solving Customer Problems

In today’s fast-moving, ever-changing digital culture no one has all the answers and we need to instill an environment of psychological safety to be able to say: “I don’t know the answer, let me seek help.” In addition, leaders must remove barriers to effective collaboration inside and outside the organization.

Employees must be empowered to seek the best possible solutions, regardless of where it was created. Finally, while in the industrial age we hoarded valuable resources to gain influence, in the digital age, the natural instinct is to share the resource widely to achieve the same result. Leaders must foster a culture of sharing ideas, products, methods and best practices to build a thriving community of problem-solvers that support the company and ultimately the customer.

The Cultural Shift

Imagine taking this new mindset and using technology to link in “outsiders” such as suppliers and customers into your development projects and coming up with better ideas more quickly and cheaply than you’re doing today?

Imagine a technology company orchestrating the design of a new vehicle through an open network of interested customers, software engineers and suppliers, all working internationally with one another. It’s the model of like-minded parties, and it’s starting to happen all over the world.

Most industries are climbing aboard the collaborative approach to new product innovation. 

The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform & the Dassault Systemes Solutions

The 3DEXPERIENCE Benefits

Continuing to drive the adoption of innovation will be an increasingly competitive need to uncover many more good ideas for products and to make better and faster use of those ideas.

Companies have a number of ways to win by adopting open collaboration:

1. Grabbing value from the collaborative product or service by merchandising under their brand.
2. By adding value to the collaborative product by providing complimentary services or products.
3. By adding value to the brand at a macro level and benefiting from long-term brand association.

Take a look at the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform by Dassault Systemes

Combining Cultures As Part Of An Innovation Platform

It starts with your people; their attention, engaging and exciting them to take action and innovate for the business. Your Product Innovation 3DEXPERIENCE Platform (PIP) needs to be continually marketed within your business, attractive and easy to use. 

All of the large PLM vendors have, to some degree, been building platforms for product development. A Platformization 4.0 strategy provides a way that data can flow frictionless from process to process, tool to tool, and from user to user.

Traditional PLM has been configuration management by group. These relationships are bundled together into a single item. If a different set of parts are needed to support a customer order, product update or improvement then you need a new, different group.

Welcome To The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

In order to identify changes from a net position, rather than reviewing a whole new structure is the way to go. PLM 4.0 should move from groupings to highly configurable structures (including mechanical, electrical and software components) so that all options are in the same structure always, by recognizing changes and automatically associating them to the changes object. It’s the move from file to fluidity and out in front right now, sits Dassault Systemes’ 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform enables:

1. Users to collaborate on a common model without having to take turns or check files in or out.
2. Data to flow from application to application without having to import or export files. This in turn means that when changes are made to data, those changes are immediately updated across all applications and users.
3. Users to create variants of designs without creating copies of the models. Instead, changes to the base models can propagate throughout all variants, while all parts and suppliers can be traced through the variants in a common system.
4. Data to be streamed when and where it is needed, using the permissions and cloud-based accessibility from the platform.

Focus On The UX

The vendors have been making continuous decisions over prioritizing their investments to making collaborative design work extremely well as a platform of solutions or invest more in open APIs to move data among various solutions. DS has chosen the long-term view and focused itself on the provision of a smooth user experience via an interoperable platform approach. 

The architecture of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform features a layer of schema that sits on top of the database and facilitates access to the data that resides outside of a file format. That schema guides each application as to how to put the various data elements together for each application and user. 

The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform Future

The future is Best Practice. Everyone is the same and yet everyone is different!

Approaches to innovation, development and manufacturing demand humans and as a result, there are commonalities that can be identified while remaining unique to the product and organization.

A good PIP implementation will evolve a team’s product development capabilities, not just helping them do their existing processes faster. The real value comes from looking at the way they are doing things now and improving those processes. Typically this includes embedding simulation as part of the process within the platform, rather than as an add-on. 

The Digital Twin

When this all comes together, design teams will be able to simulate a full digital twin from design to manufacturing to performance-in-use before ever making a physical prototype. That said, all but the smallest product development teams already have their data trapped within legacy systems. 

Delivering through the Users & Designers of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

If the 4IR is driven by the Customer and their experiences, delivering innovation has to be driven by the users – it’s critical you focus on their experience through the use of a friendly Product Innovation Platform.  

I don’t like the cliche “Innovate or Die”, as it feels overly dramatic, however there’s no denying a good product and service, tied in with a strong brand will always win through. 

The internet has allowed newcomers to build brand fast and while everyday they’re looking at new ways to put you out of business, you should be doing the same. 

Innovation is not a department, it is a Culture 4.0 mindset and providing those minds with the platform to access others. Their thoughts and data seamlessly is needed immediately to give yourself a foundation for the 4IR future success.

FAQs

What is the ultimate value of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform for our customers?

The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform is a Business Experience platform. It provides software solutions for ideation, design, manufacture and maintenance of your products. Helping to forge new customer experiences to compete in the 4th Industrial Revolution. With a single, easy-to-use interface, it powers industry best practices – based on 3D design, analysis, simulation, and intelligence software in a collaborative, interactive environment. It is available on-premise and in public or private cloud.

Why is PLM needed?

PLM can be used to increase output with constant resources, to increase revenues or to reduce the resources used to produce a constant product output. This all helps to improve the bottom line.

What does Dassault Systemes do?

Dassault Systèmes is a multinational software company that specializes in solutions for Product Innovation enablement through a collaborative 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, 3D design, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Digital Manufacturing and Manufacturing Operations software.

What is PLM

In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from ideation, concept & engineering design through manufacture, to service and disposal of manufactured products.

Thanks, Andrew

Andrew Sparrow:

I drive New Product Innovation & Optimization projects for companies using cutting-edge tech & software solutions to keep them at the forefront of the 4IR

My Service is the provision of permanent talent & project based sub-contracted resources in PLM, Smart Manufacturing & Platformization4.0

I love & thrive in working with some of the world's largest companies such as Airbus, Capgemini, Dassault Systemes, Ericsson, JLR, TOTAL, Siemens, Sony, Subsea7 & Unilever

I'm a big people-person & have spent my life meeting as many people & cultures as I can. At my last count, I am lucky enough to have visited & done business in over 55 countries